by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
Last week
I reviewed Amorphium Pro 1.1 from Electric Image. Amorphium Pro
is a 3D modeling and animation package targeted toward designers,
with a particular bent toward Flash designers. Its features have
been implemented in a way that 2D artists can understand very
easily, and these features are quite robust. So I thought we'd
take a more in depth look at one of these today—namely masking—and
see how it fits into the overall workflow of Amorphium Pro.
If you haven't
already, you ought to download the demo from http://www.amorphium.com.
(It's available for Mac and Windows.) For this tutorial, we're
going to be working with 3D text to create a dripping effect.
To get started,
we're just going to launch Amorphium and delete the default sphere
that appears. Select the text tool from the Mesh palette, and
click in the center of your composition window. A dialog box will
appear asking you to fill out the information about your text.
I'm going
to alter my depth to 15 and my text to read "Tex." I'll
use Arial Black (which all of you should have), but this can be
done with any font that Amorphium can deal with. (Some fonts don't
work right in Amorphium.) I'm also going to change my face, bevel
and side colors to something more neutral.
Now we're
going to go straight into masking. Click the Mask button in your
menu bar. By default, the mask paintbrush will be selected. Go
ahead and use this tool. We're just going to mask off the upper
half of the text so that when we do our dripping, we don't have
to worry about affecting the parts of the text that will remain
the same.
Masked areas
are red.
But before
we begin melting our image, we're going to increase the polygons
in the area we'll be working on. Why? Well, we want our drips
to look like drips, not like dangling triangles. Increasing the
polygon count in the unmasked areas will provide us, simply, with
more geometry to work with.
Amorphium
Pro can increase your polygon count in unmasked areas.
Just go into the Composer, select the Quad tool and click on the
object,
in this case text. You can view a wireframe by selecting
Display > Wireframe in the main Composer view.
To increase
your geometry, we're going to go back into the Composer and click
on the "Quad" tool in the Decimation palette. To increase
the polygon count, just select the Quad tool and click on the
text. Only the unmasked areas will be affected, so we won't have
to deal with too much overhead from the increase in polygons.
If you want even more detail, just keep click on the text with
your Quad tool. (But you're going to experience significant slowdown
if you do it more than a few times.)
So now that
we have more polygons to work with, we're going into the Tools
area of Amorphium. I'm going to use the Smudge tool to create
my drip effect. If your machine is acting slow, make sure you
stroke slowly as well, or you'll get some unexpected results.
You can also increase you performance by switching your display
mode to "White." The display menu is actually on the
bottom of the interface, rather than the top.
Notice
that masked areas are not affected by the smudging. The same will
be true of any other tools or effects you use, including paint.
I'm going to paint over my text top to bottom, though, so I'll
need to get rid of my mask now. To do so, I just go back into
Mask, select the Clear Mask tool and click on my object.
Now the mask
is gone, and I can paint to my heart's content. I'm going to add
red paint to the bottom and some green, brown and yellow paint
to the top. I'm also going to go into Material mode and add some
roughness, specular lighting and other material properties.
Finally, just
for a little more text, I'm going to go into the FX mode and add
just a tiny bit of noise to the entire object. And here's what
I wind up with:
And now our
text is ready for animating or whatever else you want to do with
it. So there's a quick look at how masking works in Amorphium
Pro. In future installments, we'll cover more features of this
versatile program. For more information or to download the demo,
visit http://www.amorphium.com.
