MJW

The Magic Wand approach is a bad way to make the background transparent for a black-on-white image like the snail drawing. Do as @Joshua Lamusga suggests: use a plugin that converts white to transparent, such as Switch Gray to Alpha or Color Clearer. There are a number of others that will also work, such as the Grim Color Reaper. The problem with using the Magic Wand is that most black-on-white images contain gray pixels on the edges of the black areas, to make the edges look smooth, not jagged. If the tolerance of the Magic Wand is set high when selecting the background, so that all non-black pixels are selected, these pixels will be deleted, distorting the image and leaving a jaggy edge. If the tolerance is set low, so that only the truly white pixels are selected, the gray pixels will remain, and if the edited image is placed over a colored background, will be clearly visible as a jagged gray halo. Using one of the white-to-transparent plugins will convert the gray pixels to partially-transparent black pixels.

Assuming I understand correctly what you mean, there's already a shortcut to do that, and it's the one you suggest: Ctrl+Shift+C. If you press Ctrl+Shift+C, the currently visible (flattened) image is copied to the clipboard. If there's an active selection, the flattened selection is copied to the clipboard, surrounded by a transparent rectangle the size of the bounding-rectangle for the selection.

Thank you very much for your kind praise, @welshblue! Also, thanks for lobbying for the Galleria selection. Appreciation of my entry from someone as talented as you means a lot.

Yes. I think it might have been quicker to build an actual hourglass, including blowing the glass.

Congratulations to @Pixey and @welshblue, and thanks to all who entered what I think was a very difficult (much more so than I intended) theme. In her PM, Pixey asked whether I used Shape3D or the texture plugins, so I thought I'd provide a brief explanation of what I did, since some of the techniques might be useful. First I created a "model" of the hourglass with Shape3D, as a guide. For the top and base: For the top and base horizontal surfaces (I'll describe the bottom surface; the top is the same.): I used the Shape tool to draw a filled ellipse, based on the Shape3D model. In another layer, I used Layer>Rotate/Zoom to tilt a wood texture backwards an appropriate amount. I then used BoltBait's Paste Alpha to copy the alpha of the ellipse into a layer containing the wood texture. For the top and base sides: I made a side-view profile of a leg using the Line/Cure too, then filled it with the Paint Bucket. I applied the Texture Rounder, along with the Texture Smoother, to make a rounded version. I produced a shaded version (but kept the height map for the next step -- not that I wouldn't keep it anyway). Now the trick: I used the (beta-released) Texture View Skewer to change the viewpoints (once for the top, and once for the bottom), using the horizontal-surface ellipses to determine the amount of skew. (It was something of a trial and error process.). Because of some weirdness in the Texture View Skewer, I needed to adjust the transparency of the skewed views. I used Red ochres' AlphaThreshold. The edges of the skewed versions were uneven, because the skewed versions only represent the front halves of cylindrical objects. I touched them up by sampling the edge colors with the Color Picker, then drawing in the missing parts of the edges with the Line/Curve tool. For the legs: I made a side-view profile, then applied the Texture Object Rounder and Texture Smoother. I then shaded them. Now the trick: I selected the shaded leg and copied it to the clipboard. I then selected the (cylindrical) legs from the Shape3D model and used Paste Warp+ to paste the shaded legs into the selection. That's how I got the rounded perspecive-ish shape at the top and bottom of the leg. It also appropriately scales the size. (The selection of both the shaded leg and the Shape3D leg were accomplished by selecting the outside region, then inverting the selection.) I didn't bother shading three separate legs. I used the same one for each, but then adjusted the Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation of each leg. (I also liberally applied AA's assistant to make the profiles smooth.) The hourglass glass: The outside glass was first drawn with the Line/Curve tool, then filled with the Paint Bucket to produce an object. The symmetry came for using various horizontal and vertical flips. The object was then rounded using the Texture Object Rounder and the Texture Smoother. I used various methods (I tried a lot of ideas) to produce the shape of the inner region, which is basically a slightly shrunk-down version of the outer shape. In the end I think it was mostly a combination of BoltBait's Bevel Object, and Line/Curve. For the inner glass, I once again produced a rounded height map from the shape using the Texture Object Rounder and Texture Smoother. The glass shading combined Texture Shader lighting and equirectangular shading with ad-hoc tricks, mostly using BoltBaits's Bevel Object and perhaps Inner Shadow (there was a lot of experimentation). I combined shaded versions of both the inner and outer glass. The sand The sand height maps were produced by combining "sand-shaped" height maps with the inner-glass height maps using the Texture Merger's Minimum Height Merge Method. For example, I combined a slightly distorted cone HM with the bottom inner glass HM to make the lower pile of sand. Disclaimer: This is a somewhat simplified explanation. I actually originally had the legs in a different orientation, and moved them using Paste From Clipboard. To get the proper locations, I used ochre's Gears plugin to make a three-pointed shape, which I tilted with Rotate/Zoom to fit the bottom horizontal surface. That worked really well. Much better than my original approach of just eyeing it. Also, the top and base were originally only one layer thick (two ridges, with the curved indentation in between), instead of two. They looked too thin and insubstantial, so I copied them to a lower layer then moved them up and down. Voila! twice as thick. It also had the major advantage of having three ridges, which carried on the theme of three ridges in the middle of the legs. One more thing: I would very much like to release a more functional version of the Texture Skewer, but I can't figure out how to improve the functionality to the point I want it to be while still supporting antialiasing.

If I could upvote Rick' Brewsters' previous post a dozen times, I would!

Paste Warp+ may be useful for modifying the overall shape of each word, as demonstrated in a previous thread. There's currently no plugin that will produce a sharp-cornered outline. The best method I can think of is to produce a rounded outline, then square up the corners by using the Line/Curve tool, followed by the Paint Bucket.

Something that could be useful for cartooning is Ego Eram Reputo's StickMan plugin. You can make your own figures, then move them around to provide the "skeletons" to help position your figures.

There's no way to view other layers, but there is a feature in Liquify which helps quite a lot. If you run Liquify, then right click while over Liquify's canvas, it gives you a list of choices for the background. One of the choices is Clipboard. Before running Liquify, you can make selected PDN layers visible, then use Copy Merged (Ctrl+Shift+C) to copy them to the clipboard. You can then run Liquify and use the copied layers as the background.

Very impressive!

This is getting silly, but you should notice that I italicized "almost." The purpose of italics is to draw attention to the particular word. I was emphasizing that the rule applied to most, not all, tutorials. Reply if you want, I'll have no more to say. I was on your side in my original comment, but I'm beginning to regret it. EDIT: I think you may have misinterpreted my intention when I said: " I hope you figured out that I meant to say 'not absolutely required.'" I wasn't trying to say you should have known; I just meant that I hope you didn't add the screenshots on my account, because I meant to say just the opposite.

Not my mind, but the following sentence where I said: Also, the idea that this is a rare exception that absolutely requires screenshots is a bit illogical.

I hope you figured out that I meant to say "not absolutely required." (The sccreenshots do improve it.)

I've got to say, I think this is one of those rare exceptions where screenshots are not absolutely required. The rule is: It be improved by having screenshots, but I think most anyone could follow it with just the text.

Well, I certainly appreciate what you both did. I hope my entry will justify the extra time.

Thank you!

I request that the Hourglass OOTF entry period not be closed on July 29th. It was opened on July 19th, which is only about ten days, instead of the usual fourteen. It's quite a difficult theme, and my entry will probably not be completed by tomorrow.

I hate to volunteer to do something, then not do it, but I'll try to write this plugin. I've probably got most of the stuff needed in other plugins. (Please no reps before I actually release the thing! It will only make me feel more guilty if I don't get it done.)

There is, I think, a non-trivial aspect to this. If the images are spaced closely enough, they could overlap. Perhaps spacing that close could be disallowed, but the are cases where the same image wouldn't overlap if rotated to other angles. Disallowing that spacing might be undesirable. Of course it could be handled, but it's more complicated that a normal tiling algorithm.

If you're referring to Paste From Clipboard, the Offset control allows the pasted image to be repositioned. However, I thought your goal was to paste the image into the middle of the canvas. As Ego Eram Reputo points out, if you paste an image in the normal, non-plugin, way, you can move it around afterward, since the Move Selected Pixels tool is automatically selected.

There's no way to make that the default PDN action, but you might try the Paste From Clipboard plugin. The default position to paste is the center.

Great to see you back here again, welshblue! I'm so sorry to hear about your health problems.

You can also set the Gradient tool's blend mode to Difference, which gives less control, but is easier, since it can all be done on one layer. You might also try using the Texture Shader in place of Emboss. To eliminate the graininess when the Texture Height is large, you can first smooth it with the Texture Smoother. Running Surface Blur prior to the Texture Smoother is sometimes useful to reduce the amount of smoothing needed. The potential disadvantage to smoothing is that it rounds the creases. In some cases that's desirable, in others it's not. One other suggestion. It's sometimes useful to use the Gradient tool in the the Reflected or Diamond modes.

Unfortunately, it is editor dependent. Microsoft more or less considers transparent to be "transparent white," since that's what the internal value Color.Transparent is defined as. Paint.NET mostly follows that, though not completely consistently. If you want to convert all the transparent colors to transparent black, you can run my plugin Transparent to Transparent Black before saving the image. (I think transparent black makes more sense then transparent white, since all the color values are zero.) If you save in a file format other than PNG or PDN, there are no guarantees that the file conversion won't change the transparent pixels to some other value.