Topology and Happy Accidents

Been playing lately with topology, extra dimensions, contours, and related things. One of the cooler things is when you take a normal render and add a 4th dimension. But 4D+ is for another day.

Imagine you have a sphere. Pick any two points on the sphere. Draw the shortest line between them. That is the basic idea.

Now, normals are already a sphere, but the problem is that some exist in the same space. Good for some things, but not for this. Take a normal render, do a trace contour on it and see what happens. Or even thresshold on one of the individual channels. What you get is more than one 'object' so to speak.

How do you spherify an arbitrary mesh so that each point is unique? How do you pick two points on an arbitrary mesh and draw a line between them?

So I actually loaded up the main chunk of the female torso and did some junk to it. Most of the points are mostly unique, but I didn't really pay much attention to the contours or surface area.

I had a pretty good idea of what I would end up with, but the happy accidents are far more than I could have hoped for.



Take that image and drop it into Photoshop. Add a Threshhold Adjustment Layer. Play with the slider and see what it does. Now, between the original image and the Thresh Ad-Layer, add another Ad-Layer, like Hue/Sat or Selective Colour. Play with sliders and watch the happy accident magic frolic and play.

As it is, since it's a quick-n-sleazy hack, I imagine the only thing it's good for is guides. "Oh, that would make for an interesting cut on a shirt." And then switch over to Pen tools to smooth it out. If you know your ChOps, you can do all sorts of funky cuts.

For those of us who aren't Photoshop geeks, and who may need to translate what you're describing to Gimp, could you explain what you're talking about?

In Second Life, there are threshhold sliders for making clothes. For example, the length of pants. You move the slider and your pants get shorter or longer. This is a basic threshhold operation that uses the various greyscale grahics in the Character sub-folder.

You don't have to use a regular greyscale image to start with. You can use full RGB and desaturate from there. It's just a matter of the RGB that you start with and how you desaturate. (Could easily write a book on the subject of desaturating there are so many ways of doing it. Ask any retoucher about desaturing and you should immediately get no less than three answers.)

The RGB that I'm starting with is very specific. The values describe a sphere in RGB<>XYZ space and no two values should be the same (mostly not the same because I was quick-n-sleazy). This means no interesections, no extra holes, and one blob at a time. Much like cutting a melon with one slice any way you want.

For desaturing, I'm using Threshhold. This uses the luminosity component of the given image. All three RGB channels are squished down to a single channel. Then a simple rule is tossed in and you end up with pure black and pure white.

One of the tricks of desaturing is how you play around with RGB before actually desaturing. In the following example, I'm using Hue/Sat. When you manipulate HS like this, you change the lum and you get a different blob.



Since I'm haphazardly mixing different spaces, this makes for excellant happy accidents. I always find it kind of fun to just mess around and see what pops out.

Maybe you will accidentally come up with an interesting design for a leotard or one-piece bathing suit. Or maybe come up with a new way of cutting the neck line.

I can take different parts of the mesh and do very similiar tricks. I've already done a thing with the skirt mesh where I can easily and dynamically draw circles all the way around and make them wobbly in any manner. And I did this this skirt thing using nothing but Photoshop's stock tools. I've even done some bra cuts and hip cuts that are dynamically curvacious (the hips with a teeny bit of help from 3DS Max).

Yeah, this is my idea of goofing around.

Sometimes I run too fast for my own good. Gonna back it up a bit.



That is the very basic of what I'm babbling about.

Skirt is easy, but not that much harder to do other things.

Sorry, that's still as clear as mud. Maybe if you back WAAAAAY up and explain what you are trying to accomplish...... It might help my feeble brain, which has a hard time starting in the middle of the story. I can follow the technical steps -- I'm pretty proficient with Photoshop and have been creating textures for SL for a couple of years, after all -- but I don't truly understand what problem you are trying to solve.

The last image on that page just shows up as a filename.

Shows fine for me.

It's up now, I just refreshed. I guess I jumped in too quickly.

I sort of got the gist of whats going on. I do exactly the same thing. You have been doing something and do something by mistake and you get a result you love.
Then you go on a forum and try and explain what it is you have done and jump in expecting those reading to understand wahts floating around in your head.

If its what i think it is then its pretty exciting.