Red ochre's diabolical drawings - update 26th Sept 2024 (last page)

[Red ochre]

Hello Sasha - I'm enjoying watching your progress with the tutorials - good work!

 

Hi Welshy - We've got dragons around here too you know! (see page one)

 

Nanette/Pixey - The work on the 'Alienhills' landscape made me realise how much work must go into your digital paintings - I'm more at home with a real paint brush than a mouse!

 

Barbieq25 - well Happy new year - must be strange living in the future

Thanks for commenting and I hope 2013 brings you good things.

 

Re: Tutorials - well when I publish 'clipwarp' I will give some instructions and some time in the new year will attempt a full tutorial.

But very complimented that you should ask

 

To all Happy New Year! whenever it arrives around the globe.

[HELEN]

Your work is just fabulous. I love the liquid letters--so real! You have your own unique style and I like it. Happy New Year to you, too!!!

[Red ochre]

Another one's hatched!

[barbieq25]

Awesome! Aw, that really is so well done! I love the dragon & the glow, esp how it is reflected on the text. The texture on the glassy part is fabulous. It was very popular some decades ago. Bark glass?

 

In any case this is just so wonderful. A top-notch image!

[HELEN]

Maybe a dragon is being born....I knew they existed! Awesome work, Red Ochre!

[Red ochre]

Many thanks Welshy, Barbieq & Helen - your replies are always very appreciated!

 

They keep hatching out - so I'm keeping them warm in the oven.

 

I generated the texture by starting with an elliptical gradient with dents run on it, then running clipwarp to distort it by its own gradient.

Yes it does look a bit like the 'obscured' glass used for bathrooms.

Still experimenting!

[DrewDale]

Really liking that dragon Red ochre, The same as welshblue, i'm going to search through my textures and see what I can come up with

[dug]

Some cool pieces you have produced while creating this potentially hot plug-in.The different ideas being created by everyone is astounding.You should be very proud of your plug-in skills. Artist and plug-in developer what an amazing combination.Thank you for sharing it all with us.

[sashwilko]

Very good work on the dragon hatching, I love what can be done with your clip warp plug in

[Pixey]

My dreams are even littered with Clipwarp images now .

 

Just love the new hatchlings especially the first one.  Super!

Edited January 14, 2013 by nanettealsop

[blackpenny]

Clipwarp rocks! Your gallery is awesome, I wish I could see large versions of the older ones but the thumbnails don't work for me.

 

Love the dragons!

[Red ochre]

blackpenny - thanks for letting me know about the thumbnails not working. I've just spent all evening sorting them out - very annoying!

Thing is they broke all by themselves and lost the urls to the big images too, so had to re-do all over .

(better stop or this will qualify for 'rants').

 

Anyway - thanks for the feedback on clipwarp and the recent dragons

 

'Pixey' - my nightmares are filled with forum BB code! - just kidding - glad you're enjoying 'clipwarp'.

 

Sasha - thanks - good work on your 'compass' too!

 

Dug! - congrats on the weird-award!  - I'll have to become even more eccentric before next year's awards!

Re: plugin developing - I simply downloaded codelab, read BB's tutorials and ignored the bit about understanding C#.

It's not for everyone but I recommend at least reading his codelab tutorials - there's a lot to be learned about how computer graphics work & some simple but useable plugins to compile for yourself there too.

I hadn't programmed anything since my 'Commodore 64' - 30 years ago!!! - I did do 20 years freelance sculpting/illustrating (twee ornaments  ) but got feed-up with being underpaid and ripped off (made loads of money for other people). Currently a very lazy painter & decorator!

 

Drew' - thanks for commenting - cheers - loved 'warpular bells' btw.

 

Welshy - I'd love to get clipwarp to be able to wrap a texture around an object convincingly - it works with big textures but really needs some form of smoothing - tricky.

[skullbonz]

I think you did an awesome job on these two, Clipwarp and Liquid Letters.  Well the rest are great too,lol,but those two are my favorites.  

[Red ochre]

4 new ones (still experimenting with clipwarp):

'dragonroom' - tried clipwarp using some greyscale images I made with sculptris (I'm not good with sculptris yet, but fun putting monsters in the house).

'menace' - running clipwarp on the same layer again.

'squirkhandsky' - used my old avatar as the object layer.

'cwcosinedetail' - what a catchy title! - can't really remember?

& Many thanks skullbonz.

[HELEN]

Oh......my.....gosh! This is something! The dragon in the room is just unbelievable. Reminded me of the movie, "Abyss." The hand in the sky is superb, too. I especially like the depth in each Clipwarp image. A hint would be nice. I use Bevel selection for my images, but maybe there's something else.

[blackpenny]

Wow! More great work. The dragon is amazing!

[Red ochre]

Thanks Helen and Blackpenny.

Helen - Hints:
Bevel selection is not ideal for this, (Great for other things though and may even be useful after running clipwarp).
 
Ideally you need a smooth tone gradient on the object going from black to white (or vice versa). Now the plugin simply adds the values for Blue,Green and Red to get the tone, so if you are making a grey gradient there are only 255 shades of grey, (205 more than the book!   ). However this means you should be able to get a smooth gradient over an object 510 pixels wide - black to white and back to black again. Now the 'trick' is to get a smooth transition over objects with a varying width - eg. fonts with thick letters and thin serifs. The best method I have found is to use my 'object edge' plugin, two or three times.
1.- run object edge with a large blur radius with edge set to mid-grey and middle to white, both mix sliders fully right.
Ideally you want the very middle of the object to be white, all the rest mid-grey.
2.- run it again. This time with a smaller radius, the middle-mix slider fully left and the edge colour set to black and edge-mix fully right. - this should leave the white middle and just darken down the edges.
3. use 'Overblur' plugin - default settings (overblur slider = 0, retain transparency ticked) reduce the blur radius to about 2.
4. if neccassary use Adjustments/ brightness contrast to adjust.
5. feel free to adjust the object - I sometimes draw/smudge/blur the inside corners of text to sharpen them up a touch (look closely at the corners on the 'clipwarptonemap' example in the clipwarp thread).


On the dragonroom picture the head was made using the free 'sculptris' program, which produced a grey tone image on a black background - I removed this as clipwarp runs quicker on objects (it doesn't process anything if the transparency = 0).
Other than that I did very little to the object layer prior to clipwarp.

http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

I have also found I get better results working with a large canvas size (1600 by 1200 is plenty).
Also good to copy a slightly blurred version of the background.
Sometimes useful to slightly blur the object after running clipwarp (small radius 'Overblur').
Sometimes useful to slightly increase the contrast on the object after clipwarp too.

The dragon hatching and in the fire used a scan of a drawing I did a while back. I 'prepared' this by making it an object and first blurring then 'overblurring' to get the gradient over each scale. I must also experiment with making 'plastacine/plastalline/clay' models and photographing them - (with one light source) - then using that as the oject layer.

I have also found backgrounds with a reasonably large amount of contrast are most effective.

Hope that helps.
Forgive the 'wall of text'.

[dug]

Another set of impressive pieces. It seams endless what you (everyone) can come up with using Clipwarp. I have taken a copy of your above post to use when I have more time.Hope you don't mind. I sort of worked out the gradient was important while I was playing around with the plug-in.Your above post will help greatly. Thanks for sharing your work and knowledge.

[Pixey]

More eye-popping results from your amazing plugin. The dragon in the room is riviting.

I've been playing too, trying to make a sea horse, but am not getting such as good results as you! 

I'll now digest those notes you have so kindly written down.  Thanks so much for explaining

[barbieq25]

Astounding! If that dragon has a baby can I have it, please?? It looks like you sculpted it from glass. I am having a hard time getting my head around the fact that it is an image not really 3D. The hand is great too. I like the other two but the dragon just steals the show.

 

Thanks too for sharing the notes. I will have to try them out very soon.

[Red ochre]

PB thumb links are still wrong!

[HELEN]

Woah, woah, and woah! How'd you do that?! 

 

This silver melting is incredible. It's overlapping in a lot of areas creating a nice illusion. 

[skullbonz]

Very nice pictures Red,the glass dragon looks awesome,now try the blue skull,lol. 

[yellowman]

Wow, Red, that is amazing, the shadow is so well done, it reminds me of lathe machine wastes, bravo.

[Pixey]

Holly Moly      I nearly fell off my chair when I opened up this.  Crikey - it's totally awesome.  There's some inside out and distortion mirror in there ? but the way the tendrils flow out is amazing.