Welles: Vue questions?

[Welles]

I'm with Gare on the disk sizes. The 2 terabyte disks are a little too iffy for me. In fact I've just decided that the one TB drives are tested enough to count on them so I've installed one. Prior to that I've stuck with 750's.

I can attest that Win 7 Pro 64bit can handle all sorts of legacy software. In emulation it runs a VM to load ten year old software and runs it with no problems. In fact it is so good that it has replaced my normal XP Pro VM for good as my normal Windows boot VM.

[Gare]

We should have a contest: what's the oldest piece of legacy Windows software that's actually useful (WinZip doesn't count), that you can run in Win VM?

Three D Graphics originally created TextureMaker for the Mac, they eventually released Texture Creator, and then got out of the business. This applet perhaps makes some of the most complex, photorealistic textures I've ever used (Koa wood shown below). It still works in a VM, from 1997 I think. Pixar Typestry still works, too, under regular Win 7, from 1995.

Hey, if anyone needs good high-res wood textures, DefCon offers photos for free:

DefCon X's wood gallery

My Best,

Gare

koa-wood.jpg

[Welles]

Well that's a very good generated wood texture, Gare. If anyone wants some ridiculously sized jpeg scans of BlackWalnut, Paduk, Lacewood, PurpleHeart, Zebrawood and Cedar (aromatic cedar the red/purple variety), I've put 'em up for download.

http://homepage.mac.com/wellesgoodrich/ ... ring2.html

The file is WoodScanJPEGs.zip. Each is at least 3000 px x 6000 px and saved at the highest JPEG quality.

[Welles]

Oh by the way, I cede the contest to you, Gare. I've only been using Windows for six years or so. Even though I might have some older stuff which runs just fine even on Windows 7, I'm not in your league by a mile.

[Gare]

Parenthetically, you're saying, "Wow! Gare can still run that Windows 3.1 crap, and some DOS-based text games like Zork, under Win 7!" ?

Sorry, that was in quotes, not parentheses.

I still have a lot of files with 8.3 names and in the spare time I don't have, I'm opening them to see what the hell's inside. Ex: MYST_01.PM6.

-g-

[Welles]

I just gave away copies of Myst, Riven and Myst III Exile to a guy who has a library of old out of date Mac software over in Silicon Valley... but I still have Myst on my iPod Touch. It was my favorite game of all time or maybe Riven was. It's a tossup.

[Spinland]

I don't know why, but I never "got" Myst I spent some time wandering around and admiring the great scenery but as a game I just didn't get drawn in. I did get every Infocom text adventure ever written installed on my Palm Pilot, though!

I have to exult. I re-ran the HDR panoramic sky scene in Vue that took roughly 72 hours to render on my old rig. I started it before bed last night, and this morning checked and it only took four hours! Wow, what a difference. I am now free to explore Vue's rendering and scenery possibilities without being crippled by insane render times.

[Welles]

Good for you, Spinland. It sounds as though your new computer is great!

[Gare]

Go to it, Spinner!

BTW, "Myst"? It's a laid-back MYSTery game, most distinguishable from today's fare by its total lack of gore, violence, and crime.

Sort of like Pandora?

I think I have all three volumes kicking around somewhere. Wonderful interactive eye candy, still holds up after the years.

If you like MYST, you might also like Firesign Theater's parody, "PYST".

-g-

[Spinland]

I got a voucher from Cornucopia good for getting some goodies. Looking at the stuff around that price I spotted a nice castle on a hilltop, and decided to nab it. It reminded me of the cover of a board game I used to play a lot, and today I got the urge to try to recreate it, at least reasonably closely. The castle's locked to my Vue license so I reckon that means I can't export it to Lightwave, even though I have the Export module, so this was my chance to do some playing with Vue's render engine on my new rig.

Here's the original box cover:

pic157002_md.jpg

And here's my first cut at a Vue version:

marnon_scene_550.jpg

I noted the original's lighting was pretty even, even bland, so I avoided getting too intense with the lighting. Just used a sunlight plus one spot to pick out the dragon a little better. The image has the saturation turned down about 20%, too, because the colors in the original are a bit washed out compared to what Vue does by default.

Gare, O Fontmeister, what font is that they used for the title?

Mark

[Gare]

Hi Mark—

Why copy the image right down to the typeface?



It looks like a Scandinavian/Nordic style font, although the serifs aren't continued in the lower case very much. I'm reminded of American Uncial and Thor. Check out a typeface I recreated called "Beacon" in our free stuff section.

-g-

wiz.jpg

[Spinland]

Meh. Just nostalgia. This was a whimsical idea, and I really loved that game (might actually still have it in a box in the attic). Call it a tribute or something.

I added some lighting and left the saturation at normal, re-colored the dragon to be lighter to bring out more detail. I had intended to tweak the pose within Vue but for some reason that feature isn't working at all for me, so I had to go back to Poser to finish the limbs.

One thing Paint Shop Pro has over Photoshop Elements is you can do masks from images and alpha channels in PSP. I didn't want to spend 20 minutes at a pop trying to tweak Vue's internal DoF settings (it's poorly documented and the interface looks like it was telling me the dragon was in focus, for example, only to blur it in the end. Frustrating) so I saved off the depth map and did some selective masking and blurring in PSP. Don't really have a handle on keeping the edges from looking weird yet. Probably need to feather the selection the other way from what I was doing.

Mainly this is some fun experimenting with Vue's stuff, with a fond old memory as vehicle.

marnon_scene03_500.jpg

[Welles]

It is a fine image, Spinland. BTW the font is TintorettoFill...

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/profonts/tintoretto/fill/

I found that out by isolating a fair representation of the font in Photoshop and putting it in WhatTheFont?!

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

It came up with the answer right away.

[Gare]

You got your color and lighting down jes' fine, Mark, and the scene had potential.

Don't blur to simulate DoF, though.

1. First, a depth map that's used to blur to depth of field is not intended to be applied as an alpha channel. You need a special plug-in such as Richard Roseman's doF Pro, or Photoshop's native Filer>Blur>Lens Blur filer. Blurring based on alpha channel brightness will whch the info in the Depth channel. This sort of thing might seem intuitive, but it's not. There's a big different between blurring a selection based on alpha channel information—regardless of what program wrote the info, and using a depth generating filter to apply the depth info to the image. Looky at the figure below. At top, I have a haze going, because I blurred based on brightness in the alpha channel. On the bottom, hopefully you can see that the diamond head of the cane is my focal target; I used Lens Blur with a DoF map from Cinema 4D to process both images. The bottom (correct) one has a nice gradated softening of focus toward the back of the curtain.

DoF rendering engines do not use brightness as a simple part of an equation such as, "Oh, this area is light so I'll blur it more than this darker area of corresponding RGB image pixels." Nope. There's a lot of parameters such as amount of blur, specular burn-ins, a lot of stuff. The reason why your edges in your render blew up is because the DoF map is a true depth map, taking into account edges and curve fall-off along the depth (Z) plane.

Alpha channels are used for several different things: to connote transparency, to use as a bump map, to use as depth...alphas are an extensible invention, and you have to apply the appropriate operation to get the results you need. IOW, blurring is not the same as "depth mapping" for want of a more precise term.

2. Your scene has the dragon ostensibly so close to the castle that no camera lens in the world would give you a plane so shallow that the castle's out of focus but the dragon isl, or vice-versa. Don't muck with success, IOW. Use other things such as lighting to compose the scene. Depth of Field is a trick, and if you use it too often, it becomes an overused trick.

My Best,

Gare

eye-guy-right.jpg

[Spinland]

Got it.

Actually the only things I wanted blurred were the cloudscape and the mountains in the distance, to the right of the castle hill. I didn't mean for the dragon to be blurred at all, guess that's just an artifact of my abuse of the depth map.

Welles, I was trying to get some haze and/or fog to manifest in front of/around the castle (not to copy the original so much as I wanted to see how to do it in general) but I couldn't make it happen. The atmosphere is a spectral one, and the spectral fog/haze settings are there, but when I maxed them out (the altitude setting isn't very intuitive) the most I got was a greying out of the sunlight. I wanted haze actually in the way of seeing the castle. Does that effect require adding actual volumetric objects where you want the fog, or is there some combination of settings I'm not getting?