Select colour red and mode 3d round in the attributes toolbar.

Have the path panel open. If it is not in your workspace click the panel button on the attributes bar. In the path panel 3d tab, select border and depth values which will make your heart look rounded.

If you cannot get the border deep enough, select the materials button on the attributes toolbar, and on the border/depth tab increase the maximum border width to give you a deeper heart, and check smooth spine.

To make the arrow, click on the tiny arrow in the corner of the path drawing tool to get the path tools flyout. Select the line and arrow tool.

On the path panel outline tab, for my arrow I set the line width at 6, style at a solid line, and the arrow at the end. Then I drew an arrow at an angle. Make an arrow that matches the size of your heart.

Set the mode in the attribute toolbar to 3d round, open the easy palette material attribute gallery, metallic group, and choose a shade of gold that you like for your arrow. With the arrow selected, double click on the gold to apply it to your arrow.

These examples shows us the choices available if we don't use z-merge, but stick with the layer manager. The arrow can be in front of the heart, where it is quite obviously not piercing it, or it can be behind the heart where it might be piercing it, but it is not very convincing. You could get the effect we are after by putting the arrow in front of the heart, and using the object eraser to rub a bit of it out in the middle, but if you decided that you had rubbed too much out when your image is finished, you would have to delete your arrow and make another.

With z-merge we can actually put the arrow through the heart, and adjust it at any time if we need to.

I gave the heart a z-merge elevation of 10, and the arrow a z-merge elevation of 80. These are still two entirely separate objects, and you can move the arrow up and down, left and right to get it exactly where you want it in the heart. You can change either or both of the elevation figures.

Let's take a look below at what is going on in the z-merge space. This example is not to scale. Revolving the heart with the virtual trackball made it much thinner than its virtual thickness in z-merge space, so the arrow is not 8 times as far from the canvas as the heart.

On the next page we will take a look at using z-merge with flat objects that have no 3d depth at all, and later we will make a strange shaped object by using z-merge to merge shapes together.