COVERING OUR TRACKS JANUARY 2001
by John
Mantzefield
copyright 2001
The
idea for this cover occurred to me while I was reading
an article in MacAddict magazine about the upcoming
release of Apple's new next generation Operating System
called OSX. The graphics in the magazine prompted me to
wonder how the OSX letters might look if they were done
in the style of the 20th Century Fox logo. There was
something about the building-sized letters and the
evening sky that caught my eye, so I recreated it with
an OSX theme.
MAKING
THE COVER
This cover image was created with Cinema4D-XL (C4D) because of it’s ease of use, powerful modeling capabilities and it’s flexibility to allow the setup of customized user interfaces. The image to the left shows what the entire grouping of 3D objects looks like without any surface color mapping or lighting. Most of the objects in the scene (the box and cylinder shapes) are “Primitives”, which are basic 3D shapes that are selected from a menu and then positioned in the scene. These basic forms are very handy and make creating 3D scenes quick and easy. It’s a common practice in 3D modeling to use primitives as a stating point for creating more complex shapes. Sometimes several modified primitives will be combined to realize the final object.
The
image of the OSX text on the left shows how two sets of
3D text objects were made (each with different colors
applied to them) and then they were placed next to each
other to give the appearance of a single object. While
C4D allows you to choose any font that’s supported by
your Mac, fonts like Helvetica or Arial tend to make
the most legible 3D font images.
The
image to the left shows a custom shaped building
segment that was created from several 3D parts. Some of
the original building sections were removed and a
Boolean/Subtract function was applied to make the Apple
logo window cutout that the arrow is pointing to. Very
complex 3D shapes can be modeled by cutting away
unnecessary sections, moving and scaling the parts so
that they line up correctly and then using C4D’s
“Bridge and Stitch” feature to seamlessly merge the
parts together. Other modeling tools allow you to move
or distort specific sections of an object while the
surrounding polygons will follow the moving section.
This is one component of how organic shapes like human
or animal forms are modeled - you push and pull groups
of surface polygons to achieve the desired
shape.
This cover image was created with Cinema4D-XL (C4D) because of it’s ease of use, powerful modeling capabilities and it’s flexibility to allow the setup of customized user interfaces. The image to the left shows what the entire grouping of 3D objects looks like without any surface color mapping or lighting. Most of the objects in the scene (the box and cylinder shapes) are “Primitives”, which are basic 3D shapes that are selected from a menu and then positioned in the scene. These basic forms are very handy and make creating 3D scenes quick and easy. It’s a common practice in 3D modeling to use primitives as a stating point for creating more complex shapes. Sometimes several modified primitives will be combined to realize the final object.
This
months final cover image was rendered in Cinema4D-XL at
only one half (1164 X 1497 pixels) of the required size
that was needed for the cover. This reduced image size
still took 25 minutes to render (on a Mac-9600/300Mhz)
as a 24-bit color TIFF formatted file. During the
modeling, texture mapping and lighting phases I had to
rendered about two dozen test images which were created
at only one third of the cover's final size. These
numerous renderings are done because many of the color
texture mapping and lighting features are not fully
visible in C4D's workspace. The final cover scene
contains 70 3D objects, which are made up of about
9,000 polygons. These objects are texture mapped with
12 3D materials and illuminated by 9 virtual lights of
various types. The sky background was created in
Bryce4, and it's star field was added in Photoshop.
Because I knew that the render time would be rather long for the full page resolution (2328 X 2993 - approx. 20mb) I purchased Genuine Fractals v2.0 to increase the rendered image size without effecting it’s pictures quality. Genuine Fractals is a Photoshop plug-in which allows you to save any image in it's proprietary .STN format. You open the .STN file with Genuine Fractals, increase or decrease the image size and then save this new file in any standard Mac format. This process is very fast even though Genuine Fractals has to render a totally new image.
The
white box in the image to the left surrounds the center
of the letter "X" and denotes the image areas of the
two enlargements on the right. The lower image titled
"1/2 rez" is a 600% Photoshop magnification of the
cover TIFF image that was rendered in C4D. The
enlargement above it that's titled "Full rez" shows
what the same area of cover looks like after processing
it with the Genuine Fractals plug-in. When the lower
"1/2 rez" image was reduced to 300% magnification it
looks just like the upper image.
USING
GENUINE FRACTALS
The image to the left shows what Genuine Fractals can do if it's functionality is taken to an extreme. I enlarged the G4 side view (original 1X images was 256 X 238) twice to the 3X and 6X sizes. You can see what happens to the image on the left as it was increasingly enlarged with Genuine Fractals. In Photoshop the 100% magnifications of these images all looked very good considering the small size of web site source image. Genuine Fractals works best if you start with a really sharp image, like a 3 to 8MP digital camera image.
Because I knew that the render time would be rather long for the full page resolution (2328 X 2993 - approx. 20mb) I purchased Genuine Fractals v2.0 to increase the rendered image size without effecting it’s pictures quality. Genuine Fractals is a Photoshop plug-in which allows you to save any image in it's proprietary .STN format. You open the .STN file with Genuine Fractals, increase or decrease the image size and then save this new file in any standard Mac format. This process is very fast even though Genuine Fractals has to render a totally new image.
The image to the left shows what Genuine Fractals can do if it's functionality is taken to an extreme. I enlarged the G4 side view (original 1X images was 256 X 238) twice to the 3X and 6X sizes. You can see what happens to the image on the left as it was increasingly enlarged with Genuine Fractals. In Photoshop the 100% magnifications of these images all looked very good considering the small size of web site source image. Genuine Fractals works best if you start with a really sharp image, like a 3 to 8MP digital camera image.
