Here’s my Krita talk from LinuxFest Northwest. Enjoy!
I’ve been reading up on HDR lighting for 3D. I’m no photography buff, but it’s a handy way to light 3D scenes without doing a lot of work. Then spring came around and during walks around Seattle, I’d find myself thinking, “What a beautiful day! If only I had a mirrored ball and an expensive camera handy.”
Then again, I usually don’t need high res hyper-RAW pics for scenes. A relatively low-res image gets you pretty far. I’ve always got a quick and dirty camera via my phone. But what about a quick and dirty light probe? Hence, a crazy scheme is born: to make a chrome ball keychain, and photograph it wherever I happen to be.
First, the chrome balls. They can be found in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and quantities on Amazon, but you’ll probably have to buy in a pack of 10 or 20. Why not assemble a Blender User Group, like Seabug (this Saturday!) and share the leftovers with others?
Shopping around revealed some bad news. Handier folk than I recommended either welding or tapping a screw to fix this to a keychain, but I lack both the skill and equipment to do so. Additionally, paying a professional to do one of these options would cost far more than the metal balls themselves! (quotes ranged from $60 to $600.) Hence, we turn to the glue option.
We’ll need a good work surface we don’t mind getting beat up or glued. I used this Norman Rockwell book, because like Picasso and the Ninja Turtles, he’s the sort of zeitgeist-hogging artist that even the lowliest pleb can namedrop. Hence, his literature over-saturates the pseudo-bourgeois coffee tables of Americana, and any number of volumes can be obtained for a tuppence at your local Goodwill.
When shopping for glue, search for ones that specify metal-on-metal contact, like this Loctite epoxy. Additional tools include a metal file for roughening surfaces before gluing and removing glue later, a magnet for easy anti-roll propping (old CDs work well too), disposable gloves to avoid emergency room visits, an eyelet screw, and a thicker washer for wider base and increased stability.
File on the surface of both the chrome ball’s contact point and the washer/screw contact point. This roughening will help the glue bond.
Glue the two things together, and also try to get some glue inside the washer, along the screw thread. hold them upright, with the magnet helping you out, but be careful not to let the eyelet droop; it’ll zoom right to the magnet. After a few minutes, it should be dry enough to stand on its own, but is still structurally weak.
I switched one ball to a stack of CDs for the remainder of the drying. While you’re waiting, why not read up on a grander and more obscure artist for future name dropping? Ah, Howard Pyle. That’s the ticket! Master of color, the best early illustrator to make it big mass marketing to the lowest common denominator, and an educator to whom many great students trace their lineage. Why, imagine how he’d feel knowing now that his children’s book fancies are now prized among…good news! The glue is dry.
Ready to have your mind blown? When you look at a reflective ball, you see more than the 180 degrees facing you! This means that when you photograph your ball, you’ll have to edit out two things: yourself and your keys. To minimize other artifacts that will clog your photo, use the file to remove excess glue.
Learn what you can about operating your crappy camera phone. Try to get good resolution. Also, although it illustrates the hardware, try to position the your keys behind the ball, rather than on the side.
My camera crops with only a little bit of uprezzing to put this exactly in the center of a 512×512 texture.
I distort this to a rectilinear map using the Flexify 2 filter for Photoshop from Flaming Pear. Although I haven’t tried it, there’s also Panorama Tools for GIMP, and probably some other stuff. I dunno, google it. The settings I used were Mirror Ball to Equirectangular, which jams it into 256×512. I cleaned out two artifacts: myself in front of the closet, and the keys along the left pole. In retrospect, I should have cleaned out the ball’s contact shadow (AKA ambient occlusion for you 3D types) before remapping as well.
Now to get this in 3D! I used two setups, Cycles and Internal for Blender. The Cycles render is simple. On the World coordinates tab, change the Color to Environment Texture, and select your equirectangular texture, leaving the Vector at Default. Turn on Ambient Occlusion, and under Settings turn on Sample as Lamp.
Hey hey, instantly lit scene!
For the internal renderer, you have to do a lot more finagling. First, the World should be mapped to Real Sky. Turn on AO, Environment lighting (set to Sky Texture), and set Gather to Raytrace, and enable raytracing in the Render tab. For the World texture, instead use an Image type texture (instead of an Environment Map) because this is quick and dirty, and thus can’t use Env Map’s fancy goodness. Select your equirectangular texture, and map to Vector and Default.
I painted this landscape in Krita, and threw some acapella Bob Ross music on it for emphasis. Hope you like it!
First off! I’ll be teaching Blender at LinuxFest Northwest again, so I hope to see you there!
Second off! One of the organizers at LinuxFest approached me about Krita, wondering if I knew anyone who would be willing to teach it. I’d never heard of it, but foolishly threw my name into the ring and started picking up the program. Krita is a free, open source drawing tool whose biggest feature is certainly its brush interface.
The bad news: just like GIMP, Krita’s still young, only 6 years old. It still has that rough-around-the-edges, slightly underfunded and undermanaged feel that GIMP has. I found myself looking up features that don’t exist yet, or exist but are turned off due to bugs. Navigating the UI can be painful and buggy from time to times, and you can still get the occasional crash doing mundane things like undoing.
The good news: Krita’s brush interface is wonderful. Right Click is an ever-present palette for both your favorite brushes and the currently active color. Additionally, you can use an image as your color palette. It has several great features that Photoshop still lacks, despite its enraging $500 price tag:
- Mirrored drawing!
- Hold shift for easy brush resizing!
- Erase as a layer mode transfer!
The biggest difference is hard to explain, as it’s technical in nature. In Photoshop, Brushes are limited in their function. They can slice, dice, and manipulate an image/3d-based brush, but only to an extent. Krita gives advanced pattern control, animated color variation, and (best of all) stroke bleeding. I first tried this interface technique via Mr. Doob, but this takes it out of HTML 5 and puts it into a true image editor.
In conclusion, I’m delighted with Krita, and intend to use it for many future projects. It offers something refreshing and exciting while GIMP feels like it hasn’t advanced in 5 years. Furthermore, Photoshop CS6, sadly, won’t be adding this level of brush functionality. So instead of spending $200 on your next Photoshop, consider donating to Krita’s development.
Why WordPress? Because switching between a blog and a portfolio is stupid.
Zoinks! After two weeks in Vancouver, I’m back in the states. Man, I had a blast. I worked on a project with UBC Fisheries (more to come later), followed by the Vancouver Game Jam.
I ended up on a team with James and Scott, and we made an awesome lil Unity game in 48 hours. One sleep break Friday night, followed by marathon production!
Hence, today I am taking it easy. But I still felt so jazzed about fast production that I felt like making some more stuff. So here’s storyboards for an old pitch of mine, which I pumped out in about 2 hours this morning. Stay tuned for more content from my adventures in Vancouver!
Chaka Khan…plus a conch shell.
heads
In a talk with the wizardly Tony Mullen at the December Seabug, he quipped that all drawing teachers ever say is “draw looser.” I was drawing this rather nobbly antelope off of arkive.org and felt pretty stiff. So I kept drawing until it felt loose enough. Indeed, I’d say the second-to-last one ended up the best.
My cat Charlie.
I’ve been playing with watercolor pencils on occasion.
Nekkidness.
Drew a guy, then tried to stay on the single subject.
Character studies from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland
I looked around on the internet for a fashion generator, with humorous results. Pity I can’t recall the URL.
More Disney studies, from the excellent http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/
In homage to the inimitable J.C. Leyendecker, I made a Baby New Year illustration for our tumultuous 2012. The bad news is I put this off til the last day of 2011, but the good news is I’m getting faster! This took about an hour of doodling and compositing my doodles together, plus five hours of painting.
Here’s to a great 2012!
Hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday season this year! Here’s my Christmas card, which warped into more of a comic strip than a card.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Yaaay! Finished this sketchbook in under 2 months, without resorting to unpolished unscannable gesture-binging.
Some credit for this completion deadline goes to Star Trek. I successfully watched Star Trek TNG in entirety over the last month or so, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a show so good for multitask drawing.
Sketched a lot of lifeforms from photos this time around. I was going to http://www.arkive.org/random-species over and over again. Although I grumbled about it, I tried to draw the plants, coral reefs, fish and birds it threw at me over and over. In other words, the boring stuff. In retrospect, birds, fish and fish are more interesting than I thought. But mostly, plants are stupid.
I dunno if it’s “correct”, but I like rendering fur in a specific way. Scribbling back and forth for fur doesn’t look right, because you don’t get wispy points with the fur. Similarly, repeated lines don’t look as good, because it’s hard to get a concise sense of border.
The hybrid is drawing a series of “U” strokes, where the start and end of the U create a wispy, feathery edge for fur and feathes. However, the inner border (the U bend) feels thick and materialized.
Lizards are one of my favorite things to draw. Their legs don’t fold in a hinge motion. Instead they prop up on their legs and rotate to move them. As a result, their legs bulge with muscle in all the funnest places. Also, their feet (which don’t function like springs ala mammals) have toes that point in slouchy rest poses. If a claw isn’t digging into tree bark, it lays sideways on the nail. It makes them looks a little disheveled and unplanted.
Uploaded in reverse; sketches at the top are the most recent.
