Technical Slop

Power Distort II

Power Distort II.I

Are you getting the hang of moving things around any which way you like? I hope so. While moving things around as such is cool, let's add a little extra something.

Across the top:
A really simple D-Map with two solid colours. That ugly shade of green grabs from blow and to the right. That ugly purplish whatever colour grabs from above and to the left. See? Not too bad if you've been playing with previous exercises.

Across the bottom:
For me, the next logical question was: [i]what if you bridge the gab between two colours?[/i] So I tried it and got some major coolness. Look at that! The distortion is thusly "bridged" as well. Very major coolness.

Quick note:
In this example, I used 100%/100%. I took it easy on the percentages to help keep the distortion to a visually manageable level. If I had gone much higher for the colours I picked, the distortion would have "over-lapped", and it can be confusing to the untrained eye.

I can't believe it. I'm so excited that I'm at a loss for words. Is anybody out there starting to see the potential? Starting to see the level of control?

Oh, man!

You've got to try it for yourself. I'm not saying that in a teacher-to-student kind of way, but in a see-it-for-yourself-to-believe-it kind of way.

Power Distort II.II

Alrighty, then. We've got moving solid chunks around. We've even got briding between two solid chunks. What's next?

I know! Let's do a cube! It's not that hard. Really.

I picked four colours to be in the corners. Both of the upper colours being the same is just a bizarre coincidence. No particular reason other than clicking twice on the exact same spot. From those four colours, we get two gradients: one gradient going top-to-bottom, and the other gradient going left-to-right. Then slap one more gradient in there in a Layer Mask.

In each corner is a set of numbers for those colours. The first number being Red and the second being Green (Blue = 128 all over the place). In the lower-right, the hidden colour is R=158 G=100.

See? Not too difficult. Let's take it for a spin.

And there she is with 75%/75%. Again, I took it easy with the percentages to keep it visually manageable. Had I gone much higher, I would have been "out of bounds", as it were.

And, again, the red shows "grab from" and the green shows "pull to". The white lines are the lines grabbed from the reference inverted Zoom Cube.

Now that right there is major cool. It means you can take any quadralateral of a picture and transform it into a square! Even though I was a bit sloppy with this example, it is possible to be as pixel perfect as you want it to be.

Power Distort II.III

Have you been playing with it? I hope so. I have a tendency rely on the foundation so I can move things along a little faster.

So we took a funky quad and turned it into a square. Pretty much just like Crop Perspective. But we can take this a step further with Transform Distort.

In the previous D-Map, all of my gradients were on their own layers. So, selected them and hit Copy Merged (ctrl + shift + c). Pasted that into a new layer and hid the other gradients. On the merged that just got pasted, hit Edit > Transform > Distort, and give it some wiggle. Ended up with something like this:

I took it easy on the left corners - not much difference there. The corners on the right, I moved a bit more.

Save it and play. What you should get is a funky quad turned into another funky quad, but with the white lines the same length and direction as the square example. Something like this:

If you compare the white lines in this example and the white lines in the previous, notice that they are indeed the same direction and length. However, they start at the corners of the D-Map (which got distorted). Does this idea sound familiar? I hope so. That's what building a foundation is about.

Again, I was a bit sloppy with the lines. And, again, Red is "grab from" and Green is "pull to".

Like I said earlier, you can take one quad and distort it to another quad. The corners can be anywhere you like, and you can be as pixel perfect as you care to be. Although, you might not want to get too crazy with the corners. If you get too crazy with them, chances are you will get jaggies that are hard to deal with. I still haven't figured this out to my satisfaction.

Play with it!

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