- Fri Apr 24, 2009 10:38 am
#296648
I am not sure if anyone has gone over this before. I haven't seen anything about it so I assume not. I am a little shy about sharing stuff since my last fiasco with the negative emitters...ouch. Just started messing around with this and thought I'd throw it out there and see what you all think.
The other day I remembered a trick we used to do way back in the Neolithic Mac II days to make large photo prints of our work. We took a grayscale image we wanted to print and had it output as a negative halftone film with a very high line screen. We would then use that film image to make a contact print as large as the film. The higher the line screen the better the image, appearing at viewing distance as a continuous tone print. But it was in fact made up of black and white dots.
It hit me that the same technique could be applied to a clipping map to get what appears to be a smooth edge or even an over all gradient effect. Planes of smoke, mist, vapors and fog, oh my!
Here are some real fast tests.
Gradient clipping map applied to a plane.
Applied as smoke.
What you do is create your image in Photoshop as a grayscale, the higher the resolution the better. In Image/Mode, change it to a Bitmap, in Output use something around 200 or 300 pixels/inch, I used 200 for these tests.
For Method Use: Halftone, Angle 45, Shape: round. You can experiment and try different settings.
I then changed the file back to a Grayscale, simply because I wasn't sure if Maxwell could take a Bitmap or not. Apply the resulting map as you would any other clipping map.
Here is a screen grab of the smoke clipping map. Take note of the little red rectangle. The next image is the area of the little red rectangle blown up to show the black and white dots of the halftone screen.
Cheers, Ron
The other day I remembered a trick we used to do way back in the Neolithic Mac II days to make large photo prints of our work. We took a grayscale image we wanted to print and had it output as a negative halftone film with a very high line screen. We would then use that film image to make a contact print as large as the film. The higher the line screen the better the image, appearing at viewing distance as a continuous tone print. But it was in fact made up of black and white dots.
It hit me that the same technique could be applied to a clipping map to get what appears to be a smooth edge or even an over all gradient effect. Planes of smoke, mist, vapors and fog, oh my!
Here are some real fast tests.
Gradient clipping map applied to a plane.
Applied as smoke.
What you do is create your image in Photoshop as a grayscale, the higher the resolution the better. In Image/Mode, change it to a Bitmap, in Output use something around 200 or 300 pixels/inch, I used 200 for these tests.
For Method Use: Halftone, Angle 45, Shape: round. You can experiment and try different settings.
I then changed the file back to a Grayscale, simply because I wasn't sure if Maxwell could take a Bitmap or not. Apply the resulting map as you would any other clipping map.
Here is a screen grab of the smoke clipping map. Take note of the little red rectangle. The next image is the area of the little red rectangle blown up to show the black and white dots of the halftone screen.
Cheers, Ron
the smoke looks good and you never know, this might be useful for someone who have to create something similar. Now when you written a tutorial we will know how to do it. I wasn't aware of this approach until you posted this. Remember that there are many ways to Rome. The others posted one way, and you posted a different route. 
- By jurX