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'Tis for the Glory #13 - "Splines and Rhymes"

MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
edited June 2015 in Carrara Discussion

Congratulations MDO2010! You've won nothing but dubious recognition.

So, as you probably know by now, the winner gets to pick the next subject and here it is:

-------

How about "Splines and Things That Rhyme with Splines" for the next theme. :)

For those who are as bad at rhyming as I am with the Spline modeler...

http://www.poetrysoup.com/what_rhymes_with/spline

http://www.rhymes.net/rhyme/spline

--------

Pixel pushing poets produce! No, wait, that's an alliteration. How about:

I opened Carrara and made a thing,
Of what it was, I cannot sing,
Neither pixels nor polys can frustrate me now,
Sockratease surely will make us a cow.

Does that work?

Post your entries in this thread. Oh, and since I've heard from several of you (including me talking to myself, since no one listens) we will have longer challenge gestation this time. The Deadlines is: Saturday, June 20, 12 midnight Hawaii time. Post over at Renderosity > Carrara

Maybe, even I can get something in there this time because apparently time-management is not a skill set I possess of recent.

Post edited by MarkBremmer on

Comments

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    You guys crack me up.

    Ok, I'll pick the easiest option because, well, I'm lazy. ••Splines and Wine••

    I am sooooooo original I can't stand myself. I used all this extra time for this challenge by choosing the easiest one and waiting until almost the last moment to post something. Awesome.

    That only leaves: Chimes, Dines, Find, Grinds, Hinds, Kind, Line, Mine, Nine, Pine, Rhine, Sine, Spine, Stein - for the beer drinkers out there, Vine and Whine, (sorry, Swine has already been posted)

    And for you country singer types, Cry'n, Try'n, Fry'n, Sigh'n and Fly'n.

    ---

    Anyhow, on my image, the glasses, wine in the glass and the splash on the table are all spline objects. The splash uses the handy spline bevel function to round the liquid.

    Hey, it's Friday. Maybe there is some actual wine in my future!

    Wine.jpg
    1200 x 900 - 120K
  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited December 1969

    Mark - that's awesome. Any chance of seeing a screenshot of the wine splash in the spline modeling room? I'm really curious how you made that part.

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    I have a request for a full tutorial on this over at Renderosity so I'll do a Youtube thing at some point next week and post back a with a link.

    Can't today though. Company is coming into town and that means I GET to clean house today!

    But, here is a quick look and the methods post about the splash.

    **For those that are unfamiliar with the Spline room, it creates the objects as mathematical formulas controlled with clickable, editable paths. Super easy to dynamically change the objects at any point – something that can't be done in the Vertex Room. The spline room is perfect for this kind of subject matter - lathed and extruded objects. And the file size is super small, unlike polygonal objects.

    I usually set the fidelity of spline objects to 800.

    2015-06-20_08-58-49.png
    774 x 508 - 131K
    2015-06-20_08-58-19.png
    1370 x 902 - 226K
    2015-06-20_08-57-04.png
    1200 x 771 - 346K
    2015-06-20_08-56-25.png
    1014 x 683 - 335K
  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited December 1969

    Very cool! Thanks Mark - looking forward to that tutorial.

    I tried it out based on just your images above and got an OK result (see attached render) but couldn't figure out the bevel - my spline went nuts when I clicked on the checkbox for either front face or back face and lowering the values to a point where it was not looking broken made the effect so subtle I couldn't tell it was there. :(

    BTW, if there is anyone out there who has Photoshop but not Illustrator (like me) you can still create the Illustrator Vector file. I did not know this until a few minutes ago so there are probably some other people who don't know it either. :) I'm using CS5 so I don't know how long this feature has been in there.

    Create a .ai Illustrator file from a selection in Photoshop:
    1.Open your splat (or any other image) in Photoshop.
    2.Select the image (I just used the magic wand since the splat image I found was a crisp black and white image)
    3.Go to Paths, open up the little fly-away menu and choose Make Work Path (use a tolerance of 0.5)
    4.Double click the path and give it a name other than "Work Path"
    5.Go to File->Export->Paths to Illustrator
    6.Choose the path you just named

    TestRender_01.jpg
    640 x 480 - 26K
  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    The cool thing is that the curves, points, etc. in a spline model can be animated, something that you can't do to a vertex model unless you create morphs.

    This very old and pretentious video of mine uses a spline blood pool, and is animated by moving the points around. It looks more like I'm scaling it up, so if I were to do it again, I would spend more time on adjusting the shape over time.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1MVOER4zHc

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584
    edited December 1969

    Isn't there a splat primitive in Carrara? I'm sure I've seen it on a menu, although I've never played with it. (and I'm in the middle of a DS render - a seemingly perpetual state at the mo - so I can't easily check)

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited June 2015

    @mdo2010, the bevel needs to be very small because of all the curves. Mine was .03

    @tim_a, a splat is something else entirely. It's a single square polygon to which you apply a 2d texture with an alpha channel. Other names for the same thing are billboards and sprites.

    Post edited by MarkBremmer on
  • SockrateaseSockratease Posts: 813
    edited December 1969

    MarkBremmer said:
    ...
    I opened Carrara and made a thing,
    Of what it was, I cannot sing,
    Neither pixels nor polys can frustrate me now,
    Sockratease surely will make us a cow.

    Does that work?

    Works for me!

    I somehow missed having any time for this until today!

    And in all the disasters of life lately I lost my log in for Renderosity and the email associated with it when the previous system got in a fight with an errant bit of dark matter or something and became a paperweight.

    Good thing this is Only Fer Da Glory! Feel free to post this over there and say MOO! or something silly. Or not. With The Millennium Cow abducted by aliens, none of this matters any more...

    Watch the Carrara Monthly Challenge to see if Miraclemoo can stop the aliens and rescue The Millennium Cow!

    Splines and Bovines it is.

    Mr. Space Alien is a picture of an ancient Native American image which I vectorized and spline-i-tized and extruderated into a 3D Figure!

    Except there's only one cow visible. The other cow, to keep the plural theme of the title, is actually The Millennium Cow! Turns out the latest and most credible theory about her is that she was abducted by aliens, and this render may be evidence.

    bovine.png
    1600 x 1200 - 2M
  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,050
    edited December 1969

    MarkBremmer said:
    @mdo2010, the bevel needs to be very small because of all the curves. Mine was .03

    @tim_a, a splat is something else entirely. It's a single square polygon to which you apply a 2d texture with an alpha channel. Other names for the same thing are billboards and sprites.

    I've used the splat, and it is similar to a plane used as a billboard, but different, if that makes sense. Try it out and compare. I found it somewhat unintuitive myself.

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,983
    edited December 1969

    MarkBremmer said:
    I have a request for a full tutorial on this over at Renderosity so I'll do a Youtube thing at some point next week and post back a with a link.

    Can't today though. Company is coming into town and that means I GET to clean house today!

    But, here is a quick look and the methods post about the splash.

    **For those that are unfamiliar with the Spline room, it creates the objects as mathematical formulas controlled with clickable, editable paths. Super easy to dynamically change the objects at any point – something that can't be done in the Vertex Room. The spline room is perfect for this kind of subject matter - lathed and extruded objects. And the file size is super small, unlike polygonal objects.

    I usually set the fidelity of spline objects to 800.

    Thanks!

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,983
    edited December 1969

    MDO2010 said:
    Very cool! Thanks Mark - looking forward to that tutorial.

    I tried it out based on just your images above and got an OK result (see attached render) but couldn't figure out the bevel - my spline went nuts when I clicked on the checkbox for either front face or back face and lowering the values to a point where it was not looking broken made the effect so subtle I couldn't tell it was there. :(

    BTW, if there is anyone out there who has Photoshop but not Illustrator (like me) you can still create the Illustrator Vector file. I did not know this until a few minutes ago so there are probably some other people who don't know it either. :) I'm using CS5 so I don't know how long this feature has been in there.

    Create a .ai Illustrator file from a selection in Photoshop:
    1.Open your splat (or any other image) in Photoshop.
    2.Select the image (I just used the magic wand since the splat image I found was a crisp black and white image)
    3.Go to Paths, open up the little fly-away menu and choose Make Work Path (use a tolerance of 0.5)
    4.Double click the path and give it a name other than "Work Path"
    5.Go to File->Export->Paths to Illustrator
    6.Choose the path you just named

    And thanks for that and evil too;)

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Mark & EP :)

  • That Other PersonaThat Other Persona Posts: 381
    edited June 2015

    Do any apps on Mac other than Adobe have trace capability? Affinity Designer or iDraw, perhaps? I have them, but, like with Carrara, probably only use 0.01% of what they are capable of. Anime Studio has something... don't know if it can then export to Carrara.

    PS Mark, I dropped by your Dark Arts page today and the video about roads doesn't seem to have audio... Any chance it will be updated? The weathering vid was fantastic and led to a couple of hours of exploration today, and the creation of a couple of models I have wanted for some time! Thanks!

    Post edited by That Other Persona on
  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584
    edited December 1969

    Ditto re the video - there's long minutes of silent mouse waggling on the screen, and I can only imagine what you're talking about . . .

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    Hmmmmmm, you're right - no audio. No idea what changed. Must be a QT thing. I literally have not touched those files for years. I'll see if I can convert to HTML5 and get it functioning again.

    Thanks for letting me know.

    Mark

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    Bravo on bovine spline.

  • That Other PersonaThat Other Persona Posts: 381
    edited June 2015

    Your comment about QT made me think... so I did a quick check using devices around the house.

    Mac OS 10.7 - audio is fine
    iOS6 - audio is fine
    iOS8 - audio is fine

    Mac OS 10.10 -- audio virtually not present.

    Sorry, but I don't have machines running Mac OS 10.8 or 10.9; my computers got upgraded to 10.10 to fix the render node bug in Carrara!

    Off to listen and see if I can do things without Adobe...

    Post edited by That Other Persona on
  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    My personal opinion is that ALL COMPUTERS, ALL OS and ALL SOFTWARE is inherently evil and ultimately designed by a Mega-Corp that sells drugs and alcohol also. In doing so, this so-called Mega-Corp has an endless supply of customers that use their drug and alcohol products to mitigate the brain damaging qualities their other products create. It's brilliant.

    Thanks for the QT feedback.

  • MarkBremmerMarkBremmer Posts: 190
    edited December 1969

    So, I finally got around to doing a video tour of the wine glass scene in Carrara. Hope you find this useful:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXoRUOBNQ08

    ...and I still haven't fixed the QT movies on my site yet.

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