Digital Media Designer: Tutorial: Masking in Amorphium Pro

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.