texture transform tool
sublime tool
just wanted to share progressions and demos (to come) of a project I started a day ago.
The basic idea is to have a very specialized tool like UVLayout for UV´s but instead of texture transforming.
With shortcuts and the interface I want to try out new stuff so that in the end just a few clicks are needed in order to get the texture in your workflow.
mockup of my current version:
the version that works so far can´t handle multiple shapes right now and doesn´t align so nice the outputs, but you might get the idea of what I am aiming for
what I have done so far:
- texture transformation only within the defined area
- automatic texture size calculation (should be adjustable later on)
- takes a 2 click to define a shape of 4 corners (like drawing 2 lines). More ways however will be added like where you draw just 1 line wich defines already the orientation and the radius of a rectangle
- integer, Bicubic or Bilinear pixel interpolation to choose from
some goals I have that should imo. be implemented (I´ll try to face these at least)
- ability to add multiple shapes and automaticly line up the resulting textures
- drop texture output to the OS clipboard so that one can right away paste it into photoshop without the need of creating another document in PS.
Aside from that of course batch exporting as PNG or JPEG using AIR (flash/html framework to build rich Applications)
- propper interface (no coder´s art). Should be minimalistic, very different direction as OSX or Vista.
- sliders to move the the center within the shape so that one can define where the focus is
- adjustment controls to fine-tune the corners like sniper magnifiers
- bezier grab points and the edges to bend edges, enabling to rip rurved surfaces
- help lines like a perspective grid, switchable circle, arch and other common shapes
and losts of other ideas
in comparison with Photoshop:
you might think other than the workflow it doesn´t differ much from photoshop but that´s not the case:
as I tried to illustrate in the picture the center in photoshop is completely different calculated as how I did it.
With my method however you get usually more details in your final output which is great for textures where you can´t afford to lose details. I plan on however adding silders so you can even tweak that center later one.
tell me what you think,- I hope I get some pregress with this new baby this week will post as soon as something evolves,- if you have some ideas or suggestions or links to similar stuff I´d be happy to recieve them here
The basic idea is to have a very specialized tool like UVLayout for UV´s but instead of texture transforming.
With shortcuts and the interface I want to try out new stuff so that in the end just a few clicks are needed in order to get the texture in your workflow.
mockup of my current version:
the version that works so far can´t handle multiple shapes right now and doesn´t align so nice the outputs, but you might get the idea of what I am aiming for
what I have done so far:
- texture transformation only within the defined area
- automatic texture size calculation (should be adjustable later on)
- takes a 2 click to define a shape of 4 corners (like drawing 2 lines). More ways however will be added like where you draw just 1 line wich defines already the orientation and the radius of a rectangle
- integer, Bicubic or Bilinear pixel interpolation to choose from
some goals I have that should imo. be implemented (I´ll try to face these at least)
- ability to add multiple shapes and automaticly line up the resulting textures
- drop texture output to the OS clipboard so that one can right away paste it into photoshop without the need of creating another document in PS.
Aside from that of course batch exporting as PNG or JPEG using AIR (flash/html framework to build rich Applications)
- propper interface (no coder´s art). Should be minimalistic, very different direction as OSX or Vista.
- sliders to move the the center within the shape so that one can define where the focus is
- adjustment controls to fine-tune the corners like sniper magnifiers
- bezier grab points and the edges to bend edges, enabling to rip rurved surfaces
- help lines like a perspective grid, switchable circle, arch and other common shapes
and losts of other ideas
in comparison with Photoshop:
you might think other than the workflow it doesn´t differ much from photoshop but that´s not the case:
as I tried to illustrate in the picture the center in photoshop is completely different calculated as how I did it.
With my method however you get usually more details in your final output which is great for textures where you can´t afford to lose details. I plan on however adding silders so you can even tweak that center later one.
tell me what you think,- I hope I get some pregress with this new baby this week will post as soon as something evolves,- if you have some ideas or suggestions or links to similar stuff I´d be happy to recieve them here
Replies
anyway the ones I found:
seamless texture generator
Price: EUR 34.95
http://www.seamlesstexturegenerator.com
interface:
http://www.seamlesstexturegenerator.com/stg-help.html
Seamless Texture Creator
Price: US$ 24.95
http://www.eartmedia.com/seamless-texture-creator/index.html
interface
Texturemaker
Price: €64.95+VAT
http://www.texturemaker.com/news.php
interface
http://www.texturemaker.com/tour.php
Texture Workshop
Price: $24.95
http://www.terminalstudio.com/texture.shtml
interface
PixPlant
Price: $99.00
http://www.pixplant.com/
interface:
http://www.pixplant.com/gallery.php
Texture cutter
Price: free
http://www.kochini.com/dcomp/txcut/
interface
Altostorm Rectilinear Panorama
Price: $69 - $179
http://www.altostorm.com/rlp/more_info.html#userinterface
interface:
note: this one works a bit different as the rest,- it lets you define curves which the software then tries to straighten.
It works best on distorted photos to create orthographic images from them,- sometimes even with surreal effects.
PhoToPlan
Price: not specified
http://www.kubit.de/index.htm > Produkte > PhoToPlan (horrible Javascript website)
interface:
note: Similar to Autodesk ImageModeler this one is rather a technical measurement tool - it requires thus a certain knowledge of that area in order to work with it.
Autodesk Imagemodeler (before part of the stitcher family)
Price: 995.00 $
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=11390028
interface
note: this tool is rather developed for the insurance and architecture industry as it has a strong bound to real world units and measurements. Its thus by no means easy to quickly slice out images- instead the tools tries to create a 3d model with automatic unwrapped texturized models. Not very artist friendly imo. as I tested it once before.
like I mentioned before not all of them are what I have in mind but they are in the same area. Also
- except for 1 application they all have a 1 screen interface which makes it a little bit of work switching between the modes or views or images. So personally I want to change that.
- most of them waste alot of pixel space in the interface (seamless texture generator might be the exception): to large buttons and to wide frames are my main compaints.
I haven´t tested them but I assume that not all of them can open or add images by drag & drop instead I guess they do it the classic way with a dialogue. I´ll test them on that out as well.
will post a muckup of my interface with the next post
[edit 1:]
found another one
[edit 2:]
Altostorm Rectilinear Panorama
[edit 3:]
added PhoToPlan & imageModeler
for now I plan:
- on the left: the photos where you can pick the photos, add slices and tweak them
- on the right: the texture slices where you can tweak them orthogonal
- adding a tool bar with active buttons or status symbols in the center. All actions will be mapped to keys but just to be a little bit more intuitive at the beginning also mouse clickable screen-buttons for the most important actions/ modes.
tell me what you think, perhaps some suggestions?
For this sort of stuff I like to be able to get decent results with as few button clicks as possible, and then have the option to tweak the initial results as needed when more time is available or for critical assets.
It's neat that yours is set up to arrange a texture with numerous sub-elements (i.e. UV arranging). It would be nice to have some features that further support this. Some auto-sizing could help. For example, what if you wanted to create a texture sheet that had 4 windows grabbed from 4 different photos, and you wanted the windows in the final texture to all line up nicely in a row, or be in 4 equal sized quadrants etc.
Having "Texture Workshop" type adjustments of contrast etc, usable per sub-texture would be nice (so you could color balance the 4 different windows in the previous example so they match and such).
Are you posting this in other places for feedback as well? (you should, the more the merrier)
beeing active @ flashkit.com (flash stuff) as well but this kind of topic might be less interesting there even in the sub forum of 3d, applications and alike. Only the game development section rocks (most of it 2d game stuff though).
Perhaps some other 3d forums,- that might be an option I want to use this tool in first place myself as a texture artist - for some 3d projects. So texture artists would be the perfect target group to get feedback from.
absolutely,
if I am not mistaken you still can not after all those releases of PS define the center of the disortion- which is a big sucker since most other adobe tools can do it like AE.
I plan on making a a spherify filter with a custom center- but more importantly bezier curves on the sides of a rectangle so that one can adjust to curves or rounded shapes. If I succeed in this- because it involves some new math stuff for me.
absolutely agree. I am a big fan of UVLayout and Silo (booth excellent interface and workflow design) just because of for exmple the sticky keys in booth apps make the workflow so much faster compared to others in the field.
of course I have planned myself for some unique ideas like:
- copy the result to clipboard, instead of forcing to first save it, give it a unqiue name and then open it in photohop, select all copy it and then finally paste it into what I need.
- drag´n drop images directly into the application so you dont need a opening dialogue
- auto export images with a template name like "bricks_###" which then results into bricks_001.png, bricks_002.png, bricks_003.png,...
- less or no dialopgues at all- persoanlly I hate them because they take you more clicks
- as minimalisic mouse clicks or geastures as possible for the shape definition. Though I plan on including 3-4 methods so you can pick your favourite. Right now it takes just 2 clicks to define 4 points - it´s done by basicly drawing 2 strokes that define 2 opposite sides of the quadrilateral (rectangle).
with thoose and more I plan to make the workflow extremely quick (my goal is like to make it 4x times shorter as the average similar tool).
less:
- dialogues
- text to read
more:
- instant action buttons
- more multi- functional keys -> context sensitive as well as behaviour sensitive (hold, release, drag, hold, tip,...)
- keyboard keys instead of screen-buttons
Autosize already works,- it calculates right now the average width and height in screenspace of the photo slice. In addtion to that I wrote already a far more accurate Size calulation based on
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CyclicQuadrilateral.html
but the proportion stuff is still a matter because it wont always fit- so at least there I´d need some rescale tools in the planar view - so one can change the proportions. that is a very nice thought,- and it brought me a new idea.
Instead of aligning the final cuts in cliché row/ column order with thumbnails I have the following idea:
all slices can be placed freely within that slice- canvas and be scaled proportional. With that you´d be able to determine the size in relation to the other slices.
that might be actually a little bit difficult for me,
not done much scripting with color stuff - might be a try but usually I get into PS for such. My first priority is the slicing stuff.
thanks for the good feedback guys
this is looking really nice
http://home.planet.nl/~ber03728/4N6site/improc/warpplugin/main.htm
yes there has been some progress - I added a scanline renderer that can batch process multiple slices with different resolutions and or quality settings (aliasing on/off, pixel skip ect.). Its just that recently I´ve been busy with lots of different things, will try to push it sometime soon into a first alpha useable release.
Keep up the progress cant wait to check out the alpha..
I could upload a demo meanwhile though showing the rendering modes
Also the navigation in your portfolio is cool! But I can't read the text, nor enlarge the images.
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=831141&postcount=2
url of the software:
http://www.altostorm.com/rlp/more_info.html#userinterface
I tried it once the past,- it has a great concept and a good technology behind it but the workflow is painfull and very linear (wizard with steps,..)
Today I recovered the code of what I had so far,- I really hope to continue this one as soon as possible even more since with the Flash Player 10 you can create JPEG/PNG images and save it on the clients desktop - right out of the box. So it would be nice to have that build in to batch export multiple slices maybe even from within the browser.
can i have his or her number?
cool stuff!
So right now I am playing around with Adobe AIR using booth the free FlashDevelop and adobe's FlexSDK to create a standalone tool (can be exe later). I am actually suprised how easily it was with Flashdevelop to setup a AIR application and test it right away with all the AIR permissions (like writing data to the HD, clipboard,...).
What I have so far working is setting and getting the OS image clipboard - and so this weekend I want to create a quick dirty version without fancy UI just shortcuts that:
Here is another dated mock up I did once in between which shows of how I imagine things working at some point:
The curves are not a priority right now but something I'd like to have- perhaps with a way of setting custom marks inside a 4 sided face and then tweak it. So once could add as many tweak points as he wants.
But in the end I think it will be more minimalistic and just focusing on 1 image a time and one slice so that the GUI can be even more minimalistic perhaps without any button at all.
[ame]
Right now I hit spacebar to acquire any clipboard bitmap, I draw my rectangle with 2 stroke clicks and it renders after that it gets back to the clipboard. The output size is atm. hard coded and not calculated but I will address that tomorrow.
And of course it will be released, just have to figure out in what form like AIR file or exe.
I have used imagemodeler it's pretty cool and now actually comes free if you buy the "suite" solution with mudbox and mbuilder. Pixplant is pretty decent too.
i usually do this thing manually in photoshop, selecting with perspective and then bringing it to planar but it is not as fast and easy.
looking forward to it!
cheers!
Guten Abend
I think ill never understand how something like this is made.
small progress:
I did rewrite some of the classes again to clean stuff up and decided that I want to implement proper transform properties for every slice.
So just like previous sketches and illustrations I actually started programming curve control to the slice shape so that in the end there will be 9 input markers that define and tweak a slice.
Out of these 9 markers:
- 4 are the corners of the rectangle (source and mapping target)
- 4 are optional curve control points letting you bend edges (e.g when having curved photos, or FOV distortions)
- 1 centroid tweak point which will represent the center of the output render. By moving this one around its easier to tweak inside curve / falloff alignment. This is not yet working as I have to think about some math stuff first to implement it.
I should have a demo that renders just like before but with the curve control within the next few days. After that its about coding a good base to have at least good input controls (draw shape & tweak corners/ curve controls + center). After that I will release something public.It renders now the new curve quads even though I can't tweak yet the curve points (orange boxes).
Multiple areas can now be defined and will be rendered on the side. I plan on adding a shortcut or button to batch save all sliced textures to the desktop with a unique filename for each.
Online demo (without clipboard support because that is not permitted in the online FlashPlayer)
http://renderhjs.net/bbs/polycount/textureRipper/dmo1/demo.swf
I guess this a quick way to show demos in between of the bigger *.exe releases as they take more time to wrap and create.
Controls:
drag 2 line to create a shape, after that you can tweak the white and orange boxes. Del key to remove the current shape, backspace to remove all shapes.
Not sure if the perspective recovery is quite right yet?
When I try to straighten out the circles, I have to position the side orange CVs deeper in perspective than where the natural halfway point would be in the photo.
Could also be the influence from the center CV, which as you said isn't adjustable yet.
1. Zoom, the image scaled without filtering, so I can place the points/lines more accurately.
2. Button to auto-align midpoints to the centers of the edges. Would be cool if it figured out the midpoint position in perspective, rather than halfway in screenspace. Would also be nice if the function auto-aligned the center point to the center of the new midpoints.
on a side note: what's the library in the picture?
EricChadwick:
No that is not yet implemented it just uses a screen centroid of the shape, not considering the diagonals of the corners to get a center more close to correct perspective centered.
The green point will at some point be there to adjust the center spot of the texture, perhaps there will be another handler to tweak a linear curve of how things are shifted towards the center and the borders.
- was already in the Youtube video on the other page for the mouse pointer and for every corner
- There will be a auto position of the mid points at the beginning for every point. But as soon as you tweak one of them it will behave like now. That way it should be easier to just work with non curvy shapes and just straight edges.
Some extend edge just like in 3dsMax (while holding shift + mouse drag) would be nice to quickly create new faces next to existing ones.It will be back but I need to find a way so that it is not in the way and is useful;
small update:
Just as I expected some of the get Pixel methods was using integer values instead of float values which is why the demo slices look pixelated to some extend.
I fixed it and added a dynamic texture size for each slice:
Those results look perfectly use able
I am also working atm. on some icons for the different mouse actions. I don't plan adding any mouse buttons because I think that should go all through shortcuts and maybe some context sensitive text area that tells you the right shortcuts.
You should also test with high-res photos. I think users would want to use this tool with the largest source possible, to reduce the effects of distorted pixels.
After that and should it succeed with what I have in mind I can extend and add stuff. There is a lot of potential here and I already have many crazy ideas that I would like to see myself being included, but its all a matter of time and resources that I have.
I played around with some faces and body parts to see how useful it would be to grab character textures for typical game UV's that have rectified UV's to avoid pixel rotations and to increase the crispiness of low res textures.
Anyway it gave me some ideas on how to improve the tuning of the cage, like maybe adding influence points or markers to push the grid in certain areas within the shape. That way it should be easier to unwrap for example complex shapes such as a face where the nose sticks out.
is there a limitation with the source img size ?
The amount of slices is only limited to the amount of RAM you have in your computer - so you can create plenty of those all up to 2880^2 - in the end I think all this wont be such a big problem in most cases. I don't expect people to actually load 4k images into the tool which could be already capped by the windows clipboard alone (as I experienced with TexTools).
2k bitmaps booth pasting and exporting should be no problem though, rendering speed depends on the CPU speed and FrameRate I set during rendering, but here on my i7 Intel (8 CPUs) its perfectly fast. I think with all the size stuff it depends more on some clever zoom functionality so that it all fits within your screen or application window. It is not first a priority
The tweak center tool is now working even though it has atm. a very primitive curve function beneath it to shift the values. I recorded a video of 3 example images on how it might impact things:
[ame]
Time to get a first release ready, hopefully within the next few days.
(what he said)
This is a first early release of the TextureRip adobe AIR app that lets you slice and retarget images from your clipboard to your desktop as PNG images. Checkout previous posts if you don't know what all this means.
quickstart guide:
In depth features and details:
It uses now a unique session ID every time you paste a new source image from the clipboard into the app. This ID is used to generate the unique file names of the saved slices to your desktop. But it also means that you can update your slices if you are slicing from 1 image but tweaked some settings.
Saved texture slices have a filename like this: that random string inbetween is the session string, the last 3 digits the slice number.
Well that's it for now, this is a very early release so many things are not even there yet - but the way it is right now it should already be useful to some of you.
Installation guide (for the ones that hesitate to install that AIR stuff [like myself]):
Edit/ It's working great here, so nice playing with higher res pics. First time I saved to desktop nada, second time it was fine . This is gonna be so usefull.
(tried twice with both Firefox and Opera in the last 3 hours)
If nothing works download it here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y58J3CEZ
though my server should be rather stable and relieable for anyone out there even china.
had a touch of browser funkiness tho (neither firefox nor opera were refreshing
some flash I was working on, causing me to think the code was borked--had
to reboot to see that code was working fine), so maybe that's somehow related
to it. (shrugs)
anyhow, thanks for putting it up on megaupload as a backup. It downloaded just
fine from there.