Any way to sorta "bend" an image?

AtLeastIHave8Ball · October 18, 2022

I make liveries a good chunk of my free time, and one gaping issue I have to deal with is "not being able to bend images", in the image I provided (NB38, NSW Police).

I mainly want to know a plugin (or any tip) to help me replicate the checker/Sillitoe tartan (that's the pattern thing on the car), it's bent/fitted very nicely to curve on it (if that makes any sense), I'm looking for a plugin that will help me replicate this effect for liveries, bending images/warping them.

Dankeschön!

NinthDesertDude · October 18, 2022

There are multiple things going on with that pattern:
- perspective
- deformation to match the surface
- reflectivity

In order to recreate this pattern, you will need to start with a simple checkerboard pattern. I recommend creating it without being at an angle, just a perfectly normal horizontal and vertical checkerboard. There is a plugin for that, use the plugin index to find those. Remove as much of that pattern as you need and keep it on a transparent layer by itself.

Then you will probably want to apply perspective. Use Ctrl+Shift+W (rotate/zoom) to do that. If that's not good enough, search for perspective plugins because they do exist (I remember one called quadrilateral correction). Easiest to do when the checkerboard is on a layer by itself so you can see how close it is to the perspective shown in the picture. Just try to emulate the perspective here and ignore that it's not matching since deformation isn't done yet.

Now you want to deform part of it to fit over the car surface. I'd recommend getting a plugin called Grid Warp for this, though I think there are some alternatives, I'm pretty sure grid warp is one of the best ones. Grid warp uses an unrotated grid to do its warps, so that's why I recommended not rotating the checkerboard pattern ahead of time. You'll want a sparse width/height. Fiddle with it, hopefully you get something decent. Ok, now go ahead and rotate the pattern. Clean up the edges as needed, etc. You should have it placed on the car surface where you want and hopefully shaped reasonably well.

Now you want to do something so it's not a completely solid color, so it's a good time to introduce a little bloom (basically a brighter version of the checkerboard color) on top of the checkerboard. You can do this reasonably using magic wand since the checkerboard (even rotated) is still reasonably easy to select. (Tip: if you want to be more exact, you could keep an unrotated copy of it, select that copy, and then press M, M so you're editing the selection itself. Rotate the selection itself to match the rotated checkerboard. This will preserve the edges significantly better. Then move the selection itself over the actual checkerboard you're working on, and press M to return to editing the image in the selection.)

Once selected, you can apply brush strokes with a large brush radius and low opacity at 0% hardness. It's even lighter if the center of the brush is well outside the actual selected pixels. Just apply it with whatever settings you need to sort of replicate that chromatic effect (it's very subtle in this picture, so it shouldn't be too difficult).

Cheers!