On the Filter Forge page in this blog, I link to a beautiful image showing its use to create a snakeskin texture for a 3D model. But, Filter Forge is also an excellent source for filters to alter your images in a multitude of ways.
Here are two images of Eepo, the elfin warrior, at her cabin.
One is the original. For the other, I used Filter Forge to turn it into a watercolor!
After Lu Mitchell, the second full bore songwriter I got to know was Steve Gillette.
One evening at a Kerrville Music Festival in the Texas Hill Country, I was attempting to play the blues around a campfire about midnight.
There were two other musicians around the fire who were putting in the most wonderful licks and fills as I sang and played my guitar. One I recognized. It was Josh White Jr., the son of one of my childhood idols and superb performer in his own right. The other, it turned out, was Steve. We ended up at a number of the same blues campfires that week.
A year or so later, I took a songwriters’ three day workshop at another Kerrville Festival, with quite a great faculty: the late Bob Gibson, Tom Paxton, Jon Ims (She’s In Love With the Boy) and Steve.
Every now and then I still run into him (it’s been quire a few years now) at house concerts, etc. For those songwriters who might be reading this, Steve told an interesting story at that workshop:
He and Tom Campbell wrote Darcy Farrow back in 1965 based on a horse accident that happened to Steve’s sister. Late one night, John Denver was finishing an album, and ended the session by cutting Darcy Farrow (yes, they actually cut grooves into a master disk to make vinyl records those days). Normally his people would have already tied up the rights to the song, but in this case, that hadn’t happened because Denver added it to the album as a last minute change.
So, when Denver’s people asked to share the publishing rights to the song, Tom and Steve turned them down. They had formed their own publishing company, and felt pretty good about being in the driver’s seat, thereby keeping 100% of the publisher’s rights (and earnings). The song made them some great money.
However, while there were myriad John Denver compilation albums issued over the next three decades, somehow Darcy Farrow never made onto a single one. And therefore generated no additional earnings from Denver’s cover of the song, shared or otherwise.
Moral of the story: 100% of nothing is nothing.
Check him out. You’ll love him and his wonderfully talented wife Cindy Mangsen – their site is here.
The first installment of my Nursodian Tales series is up and available at the Amazon.com Kindle store (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006OROXJC), barely in time for Christmas.
Give a look! If you like it, tell all your friends and family.
If you don’t like it tell ME (and maybe not anyone else), and let me know why. That’s how we learn.
Please and thank you.
I’m just about ready to put my first story up on Amazon’s Kindle site. So, I not only needed a book cover, I needed a cover prototype. You see, I’m uploading and selling a chapter at a time. (The first chapter has 16 full color illustrations and is a self contained story. So, it works, I think.)
Ultimately they will be compiled into a complete book named Katie’s Dreams of Nursoda. So, first I needed a prototype cover for the final book.
All the images were staged in Poser, and rendered in LuxRender through the Pose2Lux plugin for Poser, giving me great images. (Poser Debut costs around $50. Luxrender and Pose2Lux are free.)However, each image was a very large PNG file (one of many formats for pictures). And, my final cover design contained a number of these images at various sizes layered on one another.
In addition, color and contrast needed tweaking for most of the images. Finally, I needed a powerful layout program that would make it easy to quickly alter the cover for each story, but end up with the same visual feel for the complete book.
So, in addition to the above, I broke out the GIMP image manipulation program and the Scribus layout program, both powerful, and best of all, absolutely FREE!
Once I had the images, I corrected them for color, contrast and brightness, sized them appropriately, layered the images together, created a graphic mask to give the montage some structure (think digital stencil) and exported the main graphic as a single, much smaller, JPG file (another image format), all in GIMP.
Then I opened Scribus and laid out my cover, pulled in the montage I created in GIMP, tweaked the image and text for size and placement, and, voila, had the prototype cover for the book.
Once that was in place, it took less than 10 minutes to grab one of the images from the individual story, drop it in the prototype, and adject the text, and create my second cover.
Here are the results:
I know I talk a lot about LuxRender in my blogs, and it has been traditionally associated with the Blender 3D creation program. I love LuxRender, but it takes a long time to give you its great images. You can also create great looking models and images with only the native tools available in Blender, and they render much more quickly.
Here’s an image of a Blender model I created from scratch following a tutorial at Firechild Video.
It’s a model of the Blender logo, and the tutorial covers two basic things. First, how to take a 2D item (a flat, straight-on picture of the logo) outline it with curve tools, and extrude it into a 3D shape. Second, how to create the great gold and blue color and finish on the resulting 3D object (which has basically a gray clayish surface when first created), and then light and render it to get this effect. The folks at Firechild have this, and a lot more! Check them out.
In several of my pages I mention a site named Renderosity.
It is not only a great place to acquire assets (many low-cost or even free), but it’s a gathering place for digital artists of all kinds.
Their extensive forums bring together users of the Blender, DAZ and Poser software packages discussed here, as well as users of just about every other digital creation software out there. They even have a forum called “Freestuff”.
You can check Renderosity’s forums out here.
Since I mention the benefits of rendering images as single-light layers on the GIMP page, today I thought I’d share some sample images and the final product using this technique.
The problem with rendering complex scenes with multiple lights is that the software has to take into account the interaction among all the lights. The computer’s task is much simpler with a single light. That’s how I took render time from 30 hours to three hours on this image of a scene created in Poser, and rendered in LuxRender via Pose2Lux. In addition, I was better able to control the impact each light had on the final scene.
In LuxRender, you can separate lights into individual groups and post render control each group’s intensity and, to a lesser extent, color, which is great. But, as noted, it took 30 hours to generate my first high quality go at the image, and it wasn’t quite right. I really didn’t want to go another 30 hours. With only one light, each sub-image only took an hour. TADA!
So, I had LuxRender generate three separate images, each with one unique light. By then loading the separate images into GIMP, I had much greater control of color and intensity, and could even have added effects like fog if I had wanted.
As noted on the GIMP page, I got this tip from Waldemar Belwon, the source of quite a bit of graphics/3D/animation wisdom. Check him out.
These images were originally generated as quite large PNGs. In the interest of efficiency, they are posted here as JPGs. (If you don’t know the difference, wikipedia will tell you all about image file formats).
Here are the three images, each rendered with a different light, and the final image generated via GIMP:
Part of my blog is dedicated to introducing my audience to singer/songwriters I have known over the years. Go to the Singer/Songwriter section of the blog to learn about the fabulous Lu Mitchell!
Today I finished setting up pages for each of the many subjects and programs I want to cover in this blog.
Next I need to make sure I understand, and configure properly, all of the items in the sidebar, as well make sure readers have the ability to share the blog with friends.
Hope to have that complete by tomorrow.
Here I am in day two of my blogging adventure. WordPress makes it fairly easy to do this, but the vision I have for the site is pretty complicated (at least for a complete noob).
I’m sure as I go along, I’ll add more and more functionality to the site. Please let me know if I go too far.
In my corporate life I regularly had to remind communication worker bees around the company that, just because you could do something on a website didn’t mean you had to do it. So, help me refrain from having unnecessary bells and whistles on the blog.
Also, give me feedback on the structure. I want it to be fairly easy to use. If your experience is otherwise, let me know.
I’m really involved in this learning exercise right now, so no work on the book today. Stay tuned.
