#22 Ghostly Apparitions

You may, or may not be a believer in ghost stories, but either way you should be aware of how easy it is to fake a ghost in a photograph. 

Get yourself a few photos to mix up. I just happen to have a Christmas angel figure, and an eye photo from one of the previous posts.

Now that you have something to work with, you can start by fading out the “ghosts”, using the opacity slider for the layers. (click to enlarge to see where the opacity slider is)

 

Select the Eraser tool and reduce the tools opacity and set the hardness to zero, so you don’t have hard edges. You can also use one of the techniques in my previous post for soft vignette edges.

Work with what you have, or get better starting photos of course.

This isn’t perfect, but, if you manage to do this, then you will have no trouble making more convincing ghosts. Mess with the curves a little so you get bloody or pure white ghosts. So now, the next time you see a “ghost sighting photo”, think about how easy it was to make. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t real, but I will believe it when I see it with my own, non-edited, vision.

#21 Easily Make 3D Chess Pieces In Cinema 4D

I do realize that I have been posting 3D more then a few times in a row, but my choices are limited, since I don’t have all the apps reinstalled yet since my Hard Disk died on me.

This is a pretty straightforward tool to use, but it' can help you model more complex shapes in minutes, or at least give you a better start then the basic box modeling start.

Lets start by modeling a custom chess piece. It’s actually a lot easier then it seems at first thought.

In Cinema 4D, set your camera to Front.

Now use the spline tool to make a shape that looks like the left half of a chess piece outline, like this:

Now all you have to do is add this spline object to a parent Lathe NURBS object. You should see the desired chess piece. If not, then fiddle with the points, and you can even get real time results like this.

Note that this way you can only make shapes that are created when the spline is rotated around the position of the NURBS parent. If you want some different modifications to the objects(such as horns, or spikes) you will need to make the NURBS object editable, and then proceed to use other modeling techniques.

The Chess Piece still needs some work from where we left off. Fiddle with the points till you get the shape you want, add a material of your choice, and set the scene. This works for most of the chess pieces, but it doesn’t work for the Rook or Knight pieces though. In other words, you need to hone your skills a little more before you can model a full set, so get to it!

#20 Quick Animation Path, Flying Disc

From time to time, you’ll come up with an animation idea that involves an object flying around, randomly or not. One way is to use the Vibrate Tag. Another way is to set the object on a path.

If you want the objects motion to be in your control, you would probably go with this way.

Using Cinema 4D, create a Cubic spline. Don’t make a Freehand spline because that can make for shaky movement. Your path could look something like this:

It doesn’t have to look nothing like that, but it should at least be curvy, because sharp edges don’t make for a smooth animation, unless the aim is bouncing of walls or something of the sort.

The next step is adding an object to the path. Create a disc for the sake of practice. Add an Align To Spline Tag to the Disc. Click on the Tag and drag the Spline object in to the Spline Path field.

Now you control the position of the Disc with the Position slide in the Align Tag. Check the Tangential checkbox for a different way of moving on the spline.

Use keyframes to animate the Disc motion on the Path. Use different speeds on the path to kill the monotony.

You can always move the Spline’s points to change the motion of the Disc. The Spline is not visible.

I used a curvy spline, but that is just one of the choices here. There are many possibilities here, along with choice of object, path and speed.

If you want you can even use a SweepNurb to make the spline visible, but more on that some other time.

#19 Light Through Objects, The Resulting Shadows

On a side note, my hard disk dropped dead this morning, and it took all of my data with it, it seems. But, I am not giving up on this blog yet! I pulled an older picture from my deviantArt account for this post.

Playing with shadows can wield some interesting, and sometimes beautiful results. I'm short on time now, so let's skip to the trick at hand.

(Cinema 4D guide)
Create a cage like object first. It's easy to do this in Cinema. Just put any object you have as child object to the Atom Array object, and Cinema does the work for you.

Now all you need to do is put a light source with it's properties set to show Visible Light and Illumination right inside the object. Combine this with yesterdays post, and put all of this into a huge sphere, with you view from inside. Play with the colors, add some noise to the light and you have yourself:

Caged Light by ~NebojsaC on deviantART

Again, use different shapes, colors and settings. Combine more objects in such scenes, and lastly, share your results! I am thinking of setting up a Submission's Sunday, so that I put up some submissions that are related to my posts, so that me and everyone can see what you made!

#18 3D Abstract Image Creation, A World Beyond The Mirror

Why go to the fare to enter a house of mirrors when you can make your own?

Again, really simple to make, even if you have zero-to-no experience in 3D software. Just Create one huge object(sphere or cube) and make sure you are viewing it from inside. Now put some other objects inside it, rotate them around, resize them etc…

If you are using Cinema, create a new material and make sure it’s Reflection checkbox is checked. Add this material to all of your objects in the scene(or at least the biggest one). Here is what I got:

All I have here is a big Cube object and a sphere inside it. The Material on them has the color you see, and the reflection set to 77%. So there are only 2 objects in the actual scene here.

You could try adding some lights to the scene, or give different colors to your materials. Try different things:

In this scene the outer Cube has a Cyclone effect applied to it’s material. A simple 30s scene.

Something to keep in mind when creating Abstract images from 3D shapes, is the fact that there aren’t many rules. So try lots of things. Add some light, play with the lights settings, add various objects, maybe add an array and use different materials on the objects:

It’s easy to do, and takes absolutely no time at all. If people don’t like what you make you can always say that it is Art. That term seems to be tossed around pretty loosely these days, so hop on the bandwagon!

#17 Beer Goggles

So, you feel like not moving away from your couch, and you happen to have your camera close by, and some empty beer bottles on the table. Remember the Through Glass trick? The same applies here.

The empty bear bottle vortex! Try it. Differently colored beer bottles give you different results.

 

 

 

You can also use it as an extra lens. If you can get a girl to pose for you, you could make a beer commercial photo. If you can’t get anyone, then I guess you will have to do:

Some factors include the beer envelope, if it has one, and the background light. Make sure you don’t use your flash, and that there is no light shining directly on the camera’s side of the bottle, because light reflecting on it’s surface will render you unable to see through the bottle.

 

 

Once you have the photo, get it into PhotoShop if need be, to increase the contrast, or to blur out the unnecessary or to sharpen what you need to be seen.

Of course, if you have to use too many tools to make the details visible, then you are better off just retaking to photo. To much manipulation and you will just end up with an abstract picture, so take it easy.

#16 Easy Do-It-Yourself Frames for Photoshop, Special Effects

Not so long ago I showed you how to make easy vignette frames for your pictures. Well, now are kicking it up a notch.

Open the photo you want “manipulated” in PhotoShop(I am using CS4, but you can do it in an older version with no difference in procedure). Use any selection tool to highlight the part of the picture that you don’t want to change and add a feather value of 20(or whatever you want actually) like so:

(click to enlarge). Now, right click the selection and then Select Inverse. Now you can start adding your effects.

Now that you have the outer side selected, you can use any brush tool, or adjustment, on just that area. I suggest clicking on Filters and experimenting with the various choices there.

This is what you can get if you use the Glowing Edges Filter.

Of course, you can use any random shaped selection for your frames, you don’t have to use the standard selection tools. And you can use this trick for more then just frames. PhotoShop does all the work for you:

It’s really simple to do, and all you need is a photo to work with and some ideas. It only takes about half a minute once you get the hang of it. You might discover a side of you that you never knew!