This is tutorial #2 in the series for changing or removing backgrounds. This method uses the extraction tool available in Photoshop CS2 (I’m not sure if it’s available in Photoshop CS, but it won’t be available in any version prior to this). Unfortunately, unless other softwares contain this tool (I don’t know of any that do), the tutorial will only be geared to those who own Photoshop CS2 upwards.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial covers ways to create a terrain and control a flow of particle moving on the terrain in Virtools. Textured dunes: download at http://www.tinkering.net/sciviz/terraindune.cmo The landscape is created With Dune color, for texture and with Dune black-and-white, for displacement map. Please note that the pictures can be created in Photoshop or from a digital camera. You can use the same image for a texture and for a displacement map. You may end up using a black and white image for the displacement map because sometimes you want to have more control over the topography.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial explains how to export a Maya scene including animated objects with simple keyframes. It uses the Virtools plug-in directly loaded in Maya. The Scene in Maya Load the “mountains.ma” scene in the tutorial’s “scenes” file into Maya. To do so, place “mountains.ma” directly in your Maya “/scenes” directory. Then place the 4 textures in “/sourceimages”. Here is what you should see: Activate Display/Polygon Counts to see the number of faces in the scene, i.e., 474 (quads or triangles). Note a certain number of specific characteristics before exporting this scene. - the vertex lighting & the triangulation.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The Lightwave 3D renderer is one of the most widely used in Film and Broadcast production because of its quality, workflow, and speed. It can now do image-based lighting due to a number of architecture enhancements in the 6.0 and 6.5 versions. One of these critical new architectures is a full precision rendering pipeline from top to bottom. Another critical ingredient is a global illumination model. Global illumination simulations produce more accurate images of lighting in scenes, by considering more light sources than simple illumination models.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments