The Fall Harvest Free•For•All!

[Gare]

Maya got us thinking; Fall is a wonderfully colorful season—all natural and all that—

so what say we celebrate the season? Post your pagan homage to Autumn right here...then let us think about the prize for the winner! Contest closes when the last leaf has fallen.

Here's a "Starter Kit": use the swatches at bottom to color in the maize: in Photoshop you can use the Color Replacement tool, Xaraists can overlay an object in Stained Glass mode, partial opacity, Corallians can do the same (Add mode seems to work well), Painter users can use Gel mode on a layer...okay, you get the picture!

What you want to do is first click the image to make it full-size (our new forum software scales posted images down), then right-click and choose "Save (image/link/whatever) As...", and then save it as a JPEG.

Better still, work from scratch and design your own seasonal painting/drawing!

Gare

[Raven Song]

Sounds like great fun!    Here's one of Sparky starling taking an Autumn stroll... (click on it for the full size)
The bird is a wood carving I did and painted -- transformed with PS paint and leaves.

[Gare]

Love it, Maya!

Hey, gang—

I did some PS work to mask a bunch of leaf photos. If you want to use them in a composition, download the PS zip file.

Photoshop leaves on layers

But if you want to have extra fun and own Painter, I made an Image Hose nozzle from them.


Painter autumn leaves nozzle

Go to town, and then jump in the pile when you're finished!



-g-

[nikkie]

My turn..... 

[Welles]

Nikkie! 

I hope I get a chance to do a Vue fall image as I've had one in mind since last year but I've been intensely busy with two online courses, one to learn XenoDream which I'll post about soon and the other an 'intermediate' course about Vue 6 Infinite. I'm learning huge amounts but those courses are inhaling all my free time.

Anyway, just in case I don't have a chance to actually do a special image, here's a Photoshop embellishment of Gare's corn.

[Gare]

That's flawless, Welles! Wonderful work!

Nikkie, your work is beautiful. I'm glad to see that your mind has not yet arisen from the gutter!

I myself haven't even gotten to coloring in the corn!

If anyone is interested, modeling the corn took three tries: at first (stupidly, suicidally), I modeled every kernel, resulting in a 100MB file. It was unwieldy; I have a detailed model of Manhattan that's smaller.

Then I tried displacement mapping. This got me 50% where I wanted to take it, but even the best-cobbled (pun intended) image map ain't going to produce good corn kernels due to their shape—geometrically, they're more like little teeth then bumps.

After doing a displacement map render, I tried lofting (sweeping) three vector profiles I built in Xara Xtreme Pro 4. I was much happier with this render and wound up using both the disp and the loft renders, combining them here and there using Photoshop. Below is one row; I think there's 30 or so duplicates of the splines in the finished model. I did the husks the same way, lofting profiles.

My Best,
Orville Redenbouton

[Welles]

Amazing!

Modeling those ears of corn was a tricky project! I can just barely understand the steps! 

[Welles]

Leaf it alone!

[Raven Song]

  Great works everyone! 
Nikki!  Looks like sprouting Mr. Acorn better stay out of the rain! (Thank goodness for leaves!)

[Gare]

Hey Welles—

The tricky part of any 3D visualization is how a 2D object can move through space to suggest a 3D object. This is Old School, though, and there are several programs today, and different ways to cobble the corn. Me, I ca intuitively build stuff by beginning with a 2D spline (path); I visualize how one or more splines can move (link, actually) through 3D space to get the resulting shape—I'm too brain damaged to adopt newer methods; I spent 10 productive years in Macromedia MacroModel, and this was the approach, similar to Carrera.

However, the new generation of modelers have adopted selective surface subdivision (SSS), where you can subdivide a surface on the fly only in areas the need it, resulting in a polygon mesh (or series of bezier patches) with a much less dense poly count...and get an ear of corn. People who have years of experience with ZBrush could "paint" the kernels; you can do this sculpting approach also in the somewhat ancient Electric Image Amorphium, Luxology modo v 302, and Mudbox, which was acquired by AutoDesk not long ago.

So to better explain what I did, I'll rely on the method of moving paths through space. Okay, most of use know what Extruding is: it's an operation by which the front 2D face of a path is "pushed" through 3D space parallel to its front. "Lathing" is another operation, unlike extruding, but the concept is similar. Look at my apple below—I lathed the 2D path by about 220 degress so everyone can see the interior. In its entirety, the trickiness here was to make the center of rotation align to the left edge of the path, not the center.

This is not what I did to make the ear of corn, though. If you lathed a shape that looks like an ear of corn, you'd get a bald ear of corn—you need intermediate steps that transverse the ear to bump out the kernels. So the operation I used is called sweeping or lofting, which allowed me to use intermediate paths—the kernels bump outward and then recede as the multiple paths revolve around a common Y axis.

But the lofting technique, at least the way I set it up, is quite similar to lathing—all I did was use three different paths instead of a single one like I did with the apple.

What you need to do, however, in prepping the paths, is to draw them with anchor points (nodes, knots, control points) that align with each other's relative positions. This is key, and it's not hard to do in Xara—you modify a duplicate of your original path, thus ensuring that the anchors line up from top to bottom or left to right, depending on what you're going to model. When the anchors between two successive paths don't align in space, you can get some interesting models such as wafting cloth, but usually it looks like Scotty had a bad hair day in the transporter room.

My Best,

Gare

[Welles]

Oho! That explanation was clear as a book, Gare.    Thank you!

[Gare]

Thanks, Welles.

Maybe I should write a book.

Seriously; not sure 'cause I gave you my copy, but I think you can do this in Carrera Studio—it uses paths and operations to move paths along directions.

I'm in preproduction for my next blockbuster release for the holiday season now. It's about a guy who texts one time too many and whose countenance turns into a hideous emoticon, doomed to roam the message boards for eternity. Or until his account gets pulled...

-g-

[Welles]

[nikkie]

Thanks, Welles.

Maybe I should write a book.

Seriously; not sure 'cause I gave you my copy, but I think you can do this in Carrera Studio—it uses paths and operations to move paths along directions.

I'm in preproduction for my next blockbuster release for the holiday season now. It's about a guy who texts one time too many and whose countenance turns into a hideous emoticon, doomed to roam the message boards for eternity. Or until his account gets pulled...

-g-

  or his account got hacked. moewahahahaha 

BTW  i am doomed to roam around the gutter of eternity....

[Raven Song]

Fun stuff, Gare! 

...and another leaf off the tree..... weeeeeeeee!