Hard Mix Cut Lines

From TechSlop

Seems like there is always an idea that fascinates me. One idea I'm always playing with is parametrics. Is it possible to create a system for easy creation of variety? I'm not just talking about colour balance tricks or tinting, either.

One place I've been meaning to try this is cut-lines for clothes. There are all sorts of different ways for cutting clothes. An excellant example of this is how female swimsuits are cut across the hips and buttocks. High or low across the hips? How much of the butt do they reveal? So many different curves for so many different looks.

The example that I will be showing will be a cut on a bra or bikini top. It's an easy example to make. And I did it real quick-n-sleazy. Even though I did it ugly and missed some little details, it has merit if you take the time.

Here we have a chunk of the female upper torso from Second Life. Some wireframe and a quick paint job.

That is half, or one extreme, of the kind of cut that I want to have.

And here we have the second half, or other extreme, of the kind of cut that I want:

What I want to be able to do is draw a cut between those two extremes. I will be doing this with gradients, Warp, and Hard Mix blending mode. Warp is basically for putting the gradient where I want them, and Hard Mix is sort of like variable Threshhold. You'll see.

Now to get the difference between the two using basic ChOps. All I did was turn the opacity down of one layer to 50% and tada. Yeah, basic ChOps. I then threw in a red outline to act as a guide.

Now to blend between the two with a gradient. New layer, rectangular marque selection, and a gradient tossed in.

I then hit Edit > Transform > Warp and did a quick job of making it fit into the red outline. This did need a bit of cleaning up afterwards, but it wasn't so bad.

With just that, it is possible to use Levels, Curves, Threshhold, or Brightness/Contrast for a small variety of cuts. All these will do, however, is bounce back and forth between the two original cuts. This is not enough. I was real curvage.

Back to the red outline and another gradient. I added antoher layer, used the red outline to make a sloppy lasso selection, and laid down the tweakage gradient.

When I set that gradient to Hard Mix, this is what I get:

Now that's cool, but not quite cool enough. To that second tweak gradient, gonna clip a Curves adjustment layer to it and mess around with the curves. What happens? Can actually use the Curves curve to manipulate the cut with immediate feedback. Dynamic.

Here are two quick examples:

Seriously, how cool is that? Using the Curves dialog to manipulate cut lines - gotta love it. I imagine if you are clever enough, you can get it to do necklines, lapel cuts, and maybe even strap thickness. Or maybe even bother doing the bikini bottom hip and butt cuts that I mentioned at the beginning. Viva la curves.

Remember, I did say that I did this quick-n-sleazy, so there are some little things that you might run into. One little thing is dealing with jaggies. Or maybe you will run into things that I didn't run into. But I'm sure you can figure those things out.