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Video tutorial – Volumetric smoke/cloud shape
Hi I’m Diony. Just fed up with recent workload and spend a little holiday time to make this video tutorial. If you remember the May 2006 library of mine, there are 2 emitters using the so-called volumetric cloud/smoke shape. But that shape is problematic because I did not get into PNG quite well at that time. Now I record this video to share my experience in re-creating this shape, in TGA format. Because PNG only allows 2-color Alpha Channel, largely limiting. Volumetric shapes is quite common in real-time 3D war-themed video game, the concept isn’t new but I think it’s worth the time to share it even now. With this, we may create a war-themed emitter library in the coming monthly release. If I have time I would join the fun…
Though Paint Shop Pro is no more for Corel’s wonderful contribution, I guess everyone proficient with Photoshop should have less problem to deal with the conversion. Have fun.
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3 Replies
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p.s. I have applied the newest youtube function “annotations” to add real-time uploader’s comments IN the video. But this seems not rendering in the off-link view. So you may watch it in Youtube directly for my annotations.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y8gWuMfNzVw -
Nice tutorial. I missed something with the all-black layer you painted on though — you were painting the alpha channel (“mask” in Paint Shop Pro terms), right? How exactly did you do this? Maybe I need to watch the video again — I was reading the text and probably missed what you did on the screen.
Also, PNG alpha channel is not limited to 2 colors. It’s an 8-bit channel just like TGA. It may be that PSP 7 limits it to 2 color for some reason.
Alan.
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The black layer (2nd layer from top) only for better observation when drawing the mask in the uppermost layer, Painting the AC mask is another story. Surely using that low opacity paint brush to stack up the big blur shape isn’t the best way. Anything that produces a blurry cloud shape 8-bit AC mask is find. Just to make sure the mask covers the upper and lower portions so it looks “volumetric” from the light.
About the PNG, I guess so. PSP7 is quite old. But I don’t wanna upgrade it to the newest version for the spyware addon. Luckily the TGA format converted by PSP7 still works well.
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