from Cloud to Planet Texture
fun experiments with PD Pro Digital Painter
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We start with an image that came from a simple digital camera, in this case my cellphone's 2 megapixel cam. This shows only a portion of the image, cropped and resampled to 800x600. It's nothing really fancy, just a cloud against the usual blue California skies. |
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That image can be loaded
as a custom brush, so you can paint and apply filter magic, even make
animations. In the end, we'll produce an animation like this: > more animations |
menu: Brush > Open...
or you can also paste it from the Clipboard straight into the custom brush system. Furthermore you can pick it from the image buffer, perhaps even just a portion of it after making a selection. There are many ways to get the desired image or portion thereof into the brush as a custom brush. And of course you can chroma-key to make the blue sky transparent.
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Once your image is loaded in the custom brush, click in a few places on the image buffer to stomp it down in those places.
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Or, paint with it! Drag the mouse and see the custom imagebeing replicated along your mouse path. Play with different 'Step' size values, i.e. change the distance that the mouse must travel berfore another replica of the brush image gets painted there.
Change the size of the brush image, and paint in other shapes, formations and with various step sizes.. Examples:
Here's an example with reduced scale, increased step distance and turning the image based on the pen's path
Next, we apply one of the edge detection filters (Convolve group), such as the Color Sobel Edge filter.
Convert to Greyscale, and apply another Color Edge filter,
to widen the edges:
You may be familiar with Light diffusion, which spreads light areas to spill into dark areas. PD Pro 4.1 offers another type, the dark diffusion, which makes dark areas appear surrounded by dark soft shadows as the darkness spills to neighboring bright pixels.
Embossing is an impressive way to further give the appearance of 3D depth such as paper. You can load another image, perhaps one rendered with a Render filter such as Bumpy toy. Render it into the alternate buffer (called the Swap buffer), and use the filter: Emboss by swap.
menu: Filters> Emboss by Swap
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While the bumpy image is still in the swap buffer, use it also for an even more impressive operation: displacement. You can displace by swap, just the same way. There are several types of displacements available.
menu: Filters> Displace by Swap > Displace
Combine another displacement, such as Pool Displace.
menu: Filters> Displace by Swap > Pool Displace
The texture looks like it could be from a dry Mercury-style planet (without the craters).
Use the Spherize filter:
menu: Filters> Transform > Spherize
If the surface looks a bit too flat, use embossing or color embossing to add some 3D deptch that looks like mountains and valleys.
Now, go back to the image prior to the spherize effect, showing just the planet texture - and then create an animation:
menu: Animation > Create... ... create 180 frames
The texture from the current image will be used as the initial image copied into each frame. Now use the Transform filter from the Animation > Timeline...
Apply a transform filter in the
Transform group, to scale the image up so as to create a margin of
additional pixels, and shifts (translate) through the texture:
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