What do I need/want to do....

Ring Design
OmegaCon CP Podcast book review
Dragon Con plans
Terragen
World Builder
UF% Animation Edition
Budget
Backup(s)
Convert home video
watch movies
Assassin's Creed
Oblivion

Woohoo! Finished Diablo 2: LoD (Normal Mode)

I finished in the wee hours of the morning and am moving Slayer Violet Jayde (lvl37 Assassin) on to Nightmare mode...looks tough.

I really need to pick back up on Oblivion now...

I used to have this up, but they decided it was gameplay footage and not a music video. Kinda sucks. I hope to find a place to post it again, but it is big and YouTube says it is a copyright violation. Funny...seems like I have seen maybe one or two other violations on YouTube...hmmmmm.

(See September 10th post...it is back!)

Good Masking Tutorial

Tutorial: Perfect masking using a highpass

Written by devvv (05 Sep 2007 08:00 AM)

There are several methods to extract/mask objects or persons from the background. But sometimes you need perfect masking that includes for example the hair of a woman. The method i use for this is called highpass. We need to simulate this filter because there is no filter in GIMP that does this for us. The point of the techqnique is that you'll save lots of time for the difficult hair part, because when you do everything right the hair is extracted automatically.

1. Open any picture that contains a big shot of a person / celebrity / whatever. I use a picture of a well known celebrity.
   
   click to enlarge
2. Duplicate the background layer 2 times, you should that layer 3 times then. On the top layer use Filter / Gaussian Blur: 18px. Set the layer to 50% transparency in the layers dialog.
   
   Then go to Colors / Invert. You should have something similar to my picture now.
   
   click to enlarge
3. Click the right mousebutton on the layer in the layers dialog and choose "Merge down".
   
   Colors / Desaturate (average). The go to Colors / Curves and apply a soft S-curve as seen on the image below.
   
   click to enlarge
4. Then choose Brightness & Contrast from the same menu. This step can vary when you use a diferent picture. We're aiming to get a good clearly vivisble contrast. Its important thyt you get nice contrast in the hairs area.
   
   We're now done with the highpass filtering.
   
   click to enlarge
5. Go to Colors / Invert.
   
   click to enlarge
6. Now you need to take a brush and paint the body of the person / object with white. To make it easier to correct mistakes you should create an empty layer above the highpass-layer and paint on this layer, when done merge the layer down. You can move the background-layer above all layers and set the transparency to 20% or so to see what parts you have to paint.
   
   IMPORTANT
   You don't have to paint the hair! Thats the point of this technique / tutorial. The hair should be already white, and everything behind the hair should be dark gray or black so you dont have to use time to get the hair extracted.
   
   click to enlarge
7. When you have the person white you have to paint the background black. Start at the borders of the body. You can do this fast when you first use a smaller black brush to paint around the person (where the gradient from black to white is visible), and then using a very big brush to fill the rest of the background with black.
   
   If you use a sperate layer dont forget to merge it down at the end.
   
   click to enlarge
8. At the end you should have an image containg almost only black an white. We use this as a layer mask now.
   
   Press CTRL+A (Selection / All), copy this using CTRL+C (Edit / Copy). Activate the background where the person is. Click right in the layers dialog, choose Add Alpha channel.
   
   Click right again and add a layer mask. Press CTRL+V (Edit / Paste) then and use the anchor-button in the layers dialog to get the copy onto the layer mask. You should the see the result immideatly. Make a white new layer behind all, then you can see the results even better!
   
   Good luck and have fun!
   
   click to enlarge

This work is licensed under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Austria.

Painkiller Manual

My TF2 Video for "Jump Around"

Clyde's Project has finally taken off...

TF2 Demo Recording Info

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Demo_Video_Creation

http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Help:Recording_demos


-First you must have your console enabled in game.

-To enable console go Options > Keyboard > Advanced > Enable developers console

-Use the ~ key to open console

-record [demoname] - Starts recording a demo of the current gameplay under the specified filename. The demo will be saved as demoname.dem in the \Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\[username]\[game name]\[game name]\ directory along with all its associated files.

stop - Stops recording the current demo.

demoui or SHIFT + F2 - Opens a small demo user interface which looks like a media player, but makes the opening and playing of demos much easier, including the ability to FF, REW and skip to specific points in the demo. You can use demoui2 to open the advanced demo user interface.

playdemo [demoname] - Plays back a pre-recorded demo of name demoname.dem.

stopdemo - Stops playback of the currently playing demo.

demopause - Pauses playback of the currently playing demo.

demoresume - Resumes playback of the currently paused demo.

listdemo [demoname] - Provides details of the specified demo file.

demo_recordcommands [0,1] - If set to 1, records any commands typed at the console into demo files.

startmovie - Starts recording movie frames, stored in the \Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\[username]\[game name]\[game name]\ directory as .tga files.

endmovie - Stops recording movie frames.

Good Internet Tech site

www.revision3.com

Good tip for Apo!

Triangle Coordinates

Apophysis Rendering & Post

Export flame to .png file with transparency on using flam3
Use 1920 x 1200 res
Quality 4000
Filter Radius 0.6
Oversample 2

Open in The GIMP
Add duplicate layers
Add Black & White layers
Play with transparency and layer modes to get a good picture
Save to .xcf file with layers for tweaking later on
Flatten & Save to .jpg
export option with Quality @ 100, subsample @ best quality

Open template file with border title and date text
pull in the one layer from the saved .jpg
resize layer to 1600 x 1000 (using smaller text boarder 1700 x 1063)
center and move up 48 pixels to center on white center layer(smaller text boarder, all centered)
edit title and date
save .xcf
save as .jpg
export option with Quality @ 100, subsample @ best quality

Filter radius: smaller = sharper image
Oversampling = render size figured at X times and scaled back down

I really need to start using this daily...


Scan old journals
get Trackmainia

More Good Apophysis Resources

Spherical-Fractal-Tutorial
Rendering Guide

MAME Cabinet #5

MAME Cabinet #4

MAME Cabinet #3

MAME Cabinet #2

MAME Cabinet #1 (www.revision3.com)

My Other Websites and/or Favorite Sites

Personal:

My Renderosity Gallery
My DeviantArt Gallery
My Flickr Gallery
My Facebook Page

Games Related:

Control Point - A Team Fortress 2 Podcast/Community
My Steam ID Page


Media Related:


Random Chatter(friends of Control Point) - A Movie/Media podcast
MediaMan Personal Media Database
Audacity Sound Editor
LAME Encoder
Disc Library - Data CD/DVD Personal Database Software
Irfanview - Freeware Graphic Viewer(lots o' features)

My Pandora Profile

Info on Rendering Flames in Apophyisis

http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gtg404y/Apo/Tutorial.html

First Post

OK, this is new territory for me...just testing for now.
That is all...