#IFF brushes etc.
26 messages in this thread
Any further insights into the IFF brush mapping problem? (mirrored images)
I hoped the patch program posted would address that, but I guess not. I
may have mentioned this before, a nice followup program for Turbo would be
one that would allow you to load IFF images and trace them into Turbo
objects, in the way that Illustrator allows you to turn bitmaps into
Postscript. Do you have any plans for such a program, or perhaps know if
one is being developed independently? Thanks for all your effort.
Keith – Both you and Phil are right about the mapping problem. It appears
that something 'crept' into our code under cover of darkness and …… in
any event we spent most of today trying to figure out why it was doing that
as that ain't in our original design. We hope to have it corrected in
another day or so, and I'll try to post another patch. We also found a
problem in some objects created with other programs and brought over via
interchange. If there are WAY TOO MANY triangles connected to s single
point, TSilver gets confused. TSilver likes very cleanly built objects. As
far as reading IFF and converting them to 3D objects, that is a VERY
DIFFICULT thing to do relibly. I think InterFOnt is the best alternative
at this point. . Stan Kalisher (Impulse)
Just a clarification: InterFont doesn't allow you to read in IFF and
convert it to 3D objects. It's a package that helps you design 3D fonts,
as well as create 3D text incredibly easily.
Steve – I haven't seen it yet but I though it could work in conjunction
with the Calligrapher font package, which allows you to make am IFF brush a
letter. It a convoluted way of doing things I know but it is one
alternative.
InterFont is on its way to you! You should have it soon, it went out last
week.
Thanks, and BTW I talked to Harriet a day or so ago, and we got all the
pricing stuff sorted out so every one is happy. I'm anxious to try loading
brushes in to calligrapher and seeing how InterFont handles the
Can Interfont work on its own, or is it designed to work with one of
the "creation" packages such as Silver, etc.?
I'm in the process of putting together a package of text and pictures that
will "officially" launch InterFont, but yes, InterFont works through the
InterChange system to create objects that can be rendered in other
packages. It does no rendering on its own. We leave the rendering and
animation to the experts in that field. You can get some incredible
results this way… I just got two Silver pictures from one of our beta
testers that blew me away! A few months back, as I was developing the
product, and I created the first few letters with it and brought them into
Sculpt, it confirmed all I hoped for in this product: that the letters
would look video-smooth and render well and quickly. You can zoom in close
to these letters, and they stay smooth. Being the minimal object for the
shape, they render quickly, too.
Aside from video and 3D, don't forget that InterFont works with
Professional Page, too, and Aegis Draw. All the text, graphics and fonts
you make with InterFont can be output as Aegis Draw objects, which gives
PostScript-smooth graphics in Pro Page. You can also rotate text, too, if
you have Aegis Draw – something you can't do in Pro Page.
I received Interfont last friday and I am very pleased with it. It is a
real timesaver and is very easy to work with.
How are you using it? Are you using the pre-made fonts, or are you making
your own?
I used it to make my own . It helped me design a logo for a local video
production company (At least the text part of the logo). It is very
tedious work, but interfont did make it a little easier. I used to take a
copy of the text on paper, shoot it with a camera and trace the genlocked
image. This is fine for objects, but for text I found interfont makes it
easy.
I'm glad you like it! Sales have been going *extremely* well, I expect a
lot of future uploaded images will contain InterFont lettering. Have you
been making new fonts with it?
Use the RM Function to read
this message.
Guessing the angle and lighting that the user wants is a tough order to
fill… I've tried a number of combinations that look good, depending on
the effect you want. Try lights beneath the object, and pairs of lights at
different angles. Remember the difference between Sculpt's "Load Object"
and "Load Scene" commands. "Load Object" loads the object at the current
cursor location. The objects that InterFont creates work well with the
"Load Object" command. If you try "Load Scene," you'll see that the
lefthand edge of the text line will be at 0,0,0 instead.
Be sure to send in your registration card, we've found a slight problem
with splines, and have prepared an update already. This only affects the
first few InterFonts that went out, like yours.
Thanks for the info, glad to hear it wasn't something I was doing wrong,
sorry to hear that you will have to spend time chasing bugs. On the IFF to
3D conversion, I wasn't suggesting an automatic conversion, more like
something that would allow you to load an IFF image as a backdrop into a
cell generating window, it would be up to the user to trace the outline of
the IFF image and create the 3D object. In my *very* limited use of
Illustrator (from Adobe) this is my understanding of what it does. You can
load any bitmap into it as a backdrop, but the program does none of the
conversion, the user is responsible for tracing the outline of the bitmap
to produce the structured Postcript object.
Illustrator 88 does a semi-automatic tracing of bitmaps… We might put that
into a future rev of InterFont, too.
The illustrator approach IS something we have been kicking around for 4 or
5 months, but as of yet we havent decided on a clean way to implement it.
Another way would be to use the genlock to bring the image into the cell and
trace it manually. This can be done in Sculpt but I'm not sure about TSilver.
Shalom
Shalom – Oh sure – we actually do that all the time. The actual technical term
for that is "Rotoscoping". The only problem is that it is only good for 2d
stuff. It's very hard to calculate the curves on an object. <–Stan
I heard that Forms In Flight 2.0 has the ability to bring up an IFF image as a
backdrop, while you are editing an object. The company didn't even think of
this application, and it's not listed in the manual, but you can do it.
Unless you can switch register's (background register) like pro gen does
this isnt possible. The genlock will show video everywhere except in the
windows on Sculpt 3d. But with Turbo it will work.
Don't feel bad, Stan, InterChange has found bugs in all sorts of programs.
When you feed data to a program that it didn't build itself, you find
things like this. Although the file format description allows something,
there are often other implicit assumptions in the code itself.
For Some reason the objects that were blowing up TSilver were created in
SC3D and interchanged over. Mitch got the cells to me and upon
examination, I found that he had cubes in it that from some reason had 56
points on the bottome and 4 on the top !!!! Whether he built them that way
or they just got screwed up in the conversion I don't know, but Tsilver
didn't like 28 points occupiying the same location. <Stan
Oh, yeah, that's the result of my Add_Extra_Random_Vertices( toget, Stan) code.
🙂
<snicker> Yeah, I couldn't beleive it. I have never seen a cube before that
was constructed with 4 points on the top and 56 points on the bottom. I will
probably call you later in the day and beam you the load/save routines.
<–Stan
Imagine converting any 50 pixel square brush to Turbo Silver. That's 2500
pixels, and that's a small brush. If you converted each pixel to a
triangle of the right color, you'd have a 2500 triangle object. If you
want the pixels to look square, you'd have a 5000 triangle object.
Obviously, if the object has regions of similar color, you could convert
them to polygons, then convert those to triangles, but that leads to
polygons with more sides than VideoScape can handle, and many long thin
triangles in Sculpt and Silver. To convert an N-sided polygon to
triangles, you get N triangles. If the brush had jagged edges like a
postage stamp, imagine how many triangles would result…
InterFont lets you trace polygons over bitmaps, but only over bitmap fonts.
We decided to make InterFont very specific, so that's why it doesn't load
any IFF bitmap. If you have Calligrapher, you can load a brush into any
character of a font, then trace that in InterFont… That works well.
Illustrator has it easy, it sends objects to PostScript, which handles
oodles of curves and line segments with ease, while 3D programs are more
limited.