moving furniture
About two years ago, I had a post in my old blog about the new Vanishing Point mode in the extended version of CS2 Photoshop 9. I noticed it, used it, but never really explored the territory.
Last week, Digital Common's video magician Justin Miller showed me how to extend my grasp on Vanishing Point: Justin showed me how he uses it to create environments. See the photo at the top of my post? We took that last week in the conference room on the fifth floor of Rider. The problem was that the room is supposed to be empty.
My process for doing something like this is generally a long and tedious one. One of the more difficult aspects is replacing patterns and textures that have been photographed in extreme perspective. Even flat walls have a texture that can make or break a viewer's sense of authenticity when viewing the piece. This image has a grid ceiling and striped carpet—things that would normally take a long time to match effectively. For this image, though, I used Justin's method: the grid system in Photoshop's vanishing point.
Snapping a Vanishing Point perspective grid over the walls in the room let me then open the 'room' as a 3d object in Photoshop. Surfaces in the photo that had been trapezoids with distorted textures were now plumb and square texture maps. And anybody can clean this stuff up.
This is pretty amazing. Might come in handy for building environments for games.
I was thinking the same thing. I can export a VPE file for After Effects and a 3DS for Max. I'm wondering if it can be used somehow with Papervision? I want to use it to generate backgrounds for comics, too- but I'll wait and do another post on that.
That is amazing. I'd love to learn that.
There's so much of this that I'd love to learn, too. I wonder what the significance is to our culture of having so many tools for jobs we haven't conceived of yet?