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		The Making Of "Voyage Of The Ferns"

"Voyage Of The Ferns" draws on my earlier experience with "genlock" textures in "Still Life With Plants", this time using scanned images of ferns as the basis for a new Aladdin image with its own special beauty and structure.

The Ferns

Developing a good fern required a simple but multistep use of ImageFX.

First, the ferns were scanned with my Sharp JX-100. The resulting scan could not be used for genlock, because the background was not a uniform color. Notice also the shadows clinging to the edge of the fern - an artifact which is always a problem when scanning a real object rather than an image or photo. This image, however, was later used as the basis for the diagram on the wall.
The initial scan has been saved and then the image is negatived.
Its contrast is raised to the highest possible level.
Color | Change Color is used to change all the blue, turquoise and purple to white. The result is then converted to grey and back to color. Then the few lines remaining in the fern and specks in the background are painted out. This leaves a mask that is very close to the shape of the fern.
Because there are blacks in the color version of the fern, the mask is inverted again, to leave a white background.
The initial scan is then reloaded into the other buffer, and rubthrough is used with flood-fill to push the image into the mask. Finally, some of the shadows and other defects are painted in by hand. Then the resulting image is rendered as a 256 color Amiga rendering to high-res laced. The render palette is then accessed, and the background color is made color 0, and the image is rerendered. The rendered image is saved for use as the Aladdin genlock texture.

The Geometry

This screen capture shows the geometry of the scene from a different perspective.

The starting point was the rectangular wall. I then created a circle with which to cut the hole for the porthole opening. That circle used 48 points, since smoothness on the curve was essential.

Though I've had problems with LOSCut before, this time it worked flawlessly. I used the Delete Cut Polys option and the Regroup In-Outside option to give a neat circular hole.

I initially thought I would create another circle and cut a hole in it for the rim of the porthole. But then I thought it would be interesting to experiment with a toroid. So I created one with all three dimensions set to 60 (I was using meters as the unit). Radius D (the hole) was 5, N1 was 2 as was N2. I used 48 for Segment 1, so that the circular outline of the torus would be as smooth as the porthole. Initially I used 24 for Segment 2, but the rendering performance was terrible, and by changing Segment 2 to 12, I obtained a torus which was just about as smooth through the hole, but which rendered much faster.

With careful scaling and placement, I fit the torus to the opening. I used a spherical wrap with a wood grain texture to generate a sense that the rim had been carefully made by bending a piece of wood into an arc.

The wall received a texture based on a scan from from my desk. Initially, I considered a complex texture, but the result distracted attention from the ferns. But the wood worked, and added an interesting wrinkle - was the view from a ship, or from inside a tree trunk looking out a knothole?

Placement of the ferns was the next issue. I originally had three ferns falling in different attitudes, but with the addition of the box with the negative fern, this was just too much complexity. Also, it didn't work well to rotate the ferns too much from flat, since genlock is truly 2D, and such things start vanishing when you rotate them - specifically, the stems would disappear, leaving disconnected leaves. That meant that the multiple falling ferns couldn't have enough variation to be worthwhile. So I left it with one.

The box on the shelf ended up looking more like the fern was sandwiched between the glass. But it was a good enough look to be left alone.

The image out the window is based on a landscape generated with World Construction Set. I blocked in an astronomical background, and, thanks to the geometry of the landscape, ended up with what looked a little like waves against the night.

Lighting was done with the two global sources at their default values, and a third source, placed in front of the wall.

Conclusion

Aladdin and ImageFX are fascinating programs with capabilities in still imaging which this work only begins to explore, not to mention advanced animation capabilities which will be the subject of future work. If you are an Amiga owner, visit the Nova Design website for more information.

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