New plugin : Cutouts and Blimps

Mistara

can blimp  puff out in the direction of the normals?

Philemo_Carrara

Mystarra said:

can blimp  puff out in the direction of the normals?

I must admit I don't understand the question. Blimps start from a flat image, there is no normals. 

UnifiedBrain

Very late to the party.  I can only echo what others have said - this is a great plugin!

However, if you add too much detail it can eat Carrara's lunch.  I would like to see an ABORT button added, when it becomes obvious that it will take a LONG time to render.  Otherwise, I have to restart Carrara.  Does anyone have a better solution?

Incredibly useful Philemo, many thanks!

Stezza

only, don't add too much detail 

UnifiedBrain

Yeah, but it is hard to judge sometimes.  Once that button is pushed...

I wanted to add that Philemo's demo video is both clear and very creative.  Super impressed.

Philemo_Carrara

There is a 2 days giveaway campaign for a program claiming to removes the background from an image, which would a nice help with cutout creation:

https://sharewareonsale.com/s/free-apowersoft-background-eraser-100-discount

WendyLuvsCatz

Philemo_Carrara said:

There is a 2 days giveaway campaign for a program claiming to removes the background from an image, which would a nice help with cutout creation:

https://sharewareonsale.com/s/free-apowersoft-background-eraser-100-discount

I use this for people
https://www.remove.bg/

only works on people though

but can see a group

bit of upsizing and GIMP foot duplication too

thanks might check that out later 

Philemo_Carrara

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I use this for people
https://www.remove.bg/

only works on people though

but can see a group

bit of upsizing and GIMP foot duplication too

thanks might check that out later 

Nice results for a web based app. Thanks for the link.

Dartanbeck

Hey, that's My green jacket!!!

Oh... Hnmpf. That's me....

                        GARSTOR                            EVILPRODUCER                        DARTANBECK

WendyLuvsCatz

WendyLuvsCatz

too complicated

I gave my email address

I downloaded it

was trial but have to sign up something else again to get more than 3 images but I am not fond of over fussy registrations so passing

I can remove backgrounds quite well in GIMP

thanks for sharing anyway 

evilkoolade

Philemo_Carrara said:

I decided to release a new plugin finalized some month ago, but for which I haven't had the time to make a proper presentation. I don't have more time now, but decided to release it anyway.

It's called cutouts and blimps. You can see a small demo here:

A cutout is a plane on which an image is mapped and the transparent parts removed. Why would you say ? Just because because the renderer doesn't like transparency. So trading polygons for transparency is usually a good bargain. For instance, a tree where leaves have no transparency renders 10 times faster than a tree where leaves are a rectangle with transparency.

A blimp is an inflated cutout, similar to the "organic" operator in the vertex room. It's useful when you want to use cutouts to populate background (a common practice) and you want a better response to light. You can see the difference in this post I made in back in February.

You can also use it as a starting point for modeling from a drawing, given that UV mapping will be Box front and back. You can also use it for titling with round, cartoon like fonts.

You can download the plugin from the usual link : https://sourceforge.net/projects/carrara-time-savers/files/

For now, there only the Windows version. I'll try to compile theOSX version tomorrow.

 

how does one code this i'd love to have a blender addon that could do this

 

WendyLuvsCatz

well alpha to mesh in Zbrush is similar as is the function in Spotlight that takes a black and white image and cuts out a mesh so I imagine Blender would already also do something similar 

I just don't know what they would call it 

maybe using Inkscape and creating an SVG?

we can do that too in the Spline Modeler I believe

I think MJCasual even has a similar script for DAZ studio but again I don't know the name

knowing the name is everything