hauksdottir opened this issue on Jul 22, 2007 · 10 posts
hauksdottir posted Mon, 27 August 2007 at 5:24 PM
You are all certainly welcome!
This was a good exercise in memory for me (working to combat brain-shrinkage).
BTW, for the curious, I used "plastic wrap" on an art nouveau seahorse stencil. It went from dry and crisp to luminously wet and shimmering.
Combine that filter with another that adds noisiness, such as film grain, and you can get snow drfts or powdered sugar for a plum cake. :) It is horribly hard to spray paint randomly (either mouse or pen will reflect the mechanics of the hand), but filters go by pure math.
Spherize and other distortions work well for science fiction illos, where you need to show an effect such as gravity waves or hyperspace or magnetism or magic by how the field affects the background. Heat shimmers distort the area behind the road, so we don't need to touch the asphalt to know that it is hot... the brain translates for us. When we see other distorted areas, we can feel the effect.
I did a game screen showing two black holes colliding (the director said something about mating zygotes, so it got changed), but had to show massive distortions of the extremely chaotic starfield. Black holes don't just sit there, they rotate. I get motion-sick on carnival rides, so it was easy to imagine complex movement, but how to show it? Play with the distortion filters! :) Whether the Enterprise is falling into a time warp or the demon is being sent back to the Elemental Plane of Fire, if the universe is being ruptured, a bit of distortion will convey that information without taking the focus from your main character.