Technical Slop

Power Distort 3

Power Distort III.I

I've shown that a quad can be made into a cube, much like Perspective Crop. Also shown that a cube can be turned into a quad, much like Transform Distort. With that combo, you should be able to take a bunch of quads and stitch them back together in new ways. Say, like the on three visible sides of a cube.

But there are problems with that route. One of the nastiest problems is hard edges. That is, no real blending between the chunks. However, I've shown that the distortion in Displace can be blended. Remember the first gradient example? Well, that idea can be expounded to include quad chunks that you stitch together in a D-Map. Then, when you use Displace, the distortion between the chunks is blended as well. All it takes is a little bit of Gaussian blur.

A cube for an example? Sounds good to me.

Upper-Left
This is a cube I made with Filter > Render > 3D Transform. I turned the background off so that the cube is all by itself with transparency around it. I also used the Magic Wand to turn the various sides into it's own alpha channel. So, just from that one cube, I have 4 different alpha channels: top, left, right, and composite.

Upper-Right
Here are my sets of quads with the lines drawn in. Red is "grab from" and green is "pull to". I was going for three diamond shapes that are the same size, but I was a little sloppy. The lines are on a seperate layer, of course, which I drag-n-dropped into my reference cube. Then I got busy collecting R and G colour values for the various corners.

Lower-Left
With my values collected and written down, I made the gradient cubes and used Distort to move them into place. Each one of these chunks, again, on it's own layer. I also darkened the background a tad for illustration purposes, so don't mind that.

Lower-Right
This is the finished D-Map. I copied each individual chunk and merged them together in one layer. Then I gave it a bit of Gaussian Blur to make the edges smooth and sexy. Remember I mentioned alpha channels? Well, turns out that I didn't need the sides, but I did use the composite alpha channel. I copied it and gave some Gauss and Levels to smooth out the corners and tighten it a bit. Used that for a Layer Mask and tossed in a 50% gray background underneath.

Saved it out and gave it a whirl.

Tada. Pretty snazzy, huh? I even went so far as to paint in some shadows and a bit of specular. Remember those alpha channels that I didn't use? Well, I could have used them to do some more chopping to add a reflection on the surface that the cube is resting on. But I'm perfectly happy with my quick paint job. Although, she does have a bit of an Elvis Presley snear going on.

And there you have a simple example of Power Distort. Other uses? Well, I've used this technique to give cars and other vehicles a better custom paint job. I've even used it to drape patterns on furniture.

There is more to this story. More tweaks for even cooler things. However, I'm not quite confident enough just yet to talk about them. In time, I will get to it.