#Whales
4 messages in this thread
You don't know me and I realize I'm a little late with this, but I
finally got a chance to download your whale images. I just wanted to
let you know that I thought they were outstanding. I recently was
experimenting with an underwater scene involving some dolphins and
schools of fish, and I just wanted to pass this along to you, just in
the remote case that you might not have thought of it:
In order to try to emulate refractive caustics shimmering on the
dolphins, I used a projector light in the scene with the other
lighting to project a bitmap(s) of the surface of a swimming pool
(digitized), along with fog, blur, etc.. The swimming pool maps
seemed to work better than other grabs of ocean and lake surfaces,
etc.. When all the elements were balanced along with the other
lighting, it looked quite realistic.
Also I used the Digimation Bubble.axp and Blackbox's Flock.axp. The
bubbles could be mapped realistically and made to be emitted a little
at a time along a path following the dolphin, and the flock.axp
allowed me to create and use simple texture-mapped fish objects as
particles. Although in my case, this was just a simple test just to
evaluate the 2 IPAS routines, the result was quite nice with very
little time put into the project.
I only briefly skimmed through your text which described the intricate
mapping process as it was very late, but I think I grasped what you
were doing. Here's a suggestion to the Yost folks or any IPAS
developers, and I am curious if you think a routine like this might
have been helpful as an alternative or aid to your clever process:
If an IPAS routine could be created which could take a mesh and
"unroll" it so to speak, and save that 2D projection of the wireframe
to disk as a bitmap, once you set up calibration and oriented
yourself with the mesh projection, I believe it could be used as an
onion skin in Painter as you did, or in some cases perhaps, be
painted directly on/over. What do you think about this ? (Hope I
made that clear enough). Any developers listening ?
Anyway, I really enjoyed the images and text (which I'll read again,
this time when I'm conscious). You probably are aware of all this
stuff, but your work was so good, I thought I would mention these
items – just in case.
>>If an IPAS routine could be created which could take a mesh and "unroll" it
so to speak, and save that 2D projection of the wireframe to disk as a bitmap<<
Excellent wishlist suggestion. I second that for IPAS or R4.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
John and Bill,
<< roll out the mesh wish >>
got it.
jonas[adesk]
Bill,
Thanks, I'm glad you like them. I played around with projected
light patterns a bit and, in the still, the caustic pattern just
didn't agree with the whale's skin much. I'm sure it will work much
better in the animation with an animated map, but I'll probably save
it for yet another underwater scene I'm doing, a prehistoric reef.
I've got digimation's bubbles, and am using it to have the
whale exhale, should look pretty cool. I'll be picking up the flock
routine when I get to the reef scene to do schooling fish. What's
your opinion on it? How much control do you have over the movement of
the objects and is there a complexity limit on the mesh used as the
master particle? I know it should be kept as simple as possible, but
I always like to have a choice.
The 'unroll' ipas sounds neat, but it could be real tricky.
Once you open and flatten out a mesh, how would it's details be made
readable? Of course if its just unrolled and not flattened out, You
could just render the mesh from the top and use that as a guide
(actually, I guess if its not flattened, which it shouldn't be, the
mesh detail might be enough). Ohh, and it could unravel the mesh
according to previously assigned map coordinates, and the bitmap it
puts out could have its borders match those of the coords perfectly,
so if your coords are half the size of the model, then the bitmap
would show only that portion of the mesh where the coords where
assigned.
I'm liking this idea more and more.
Thanks,
David