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.
