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Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Plugins / Pixel Grains
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Plugins / Pixel Grains)
Pixel Grains is a fun plug-in that creates extrusions based on an image map. Let's take a look. This project already has a Pixel Grains Plugin Object which sits on a ground plane, a simple Uber Shape. Control Option Double Click to open the Plugins Controls. Pixel Grains works by sampling an image's pixels and extruding 3D shapes based on the grayscale values it sees. So the most important thing to realize is that you need an external file to drive the extrusion; sort of like a displacement map. Except with Pixel Grains, the image is not a texture applied to the geometry channel of the plugins material. It's supplied here with this button that says Change File. Let's click that and find our image. Now the name of the file appears here in this field where it says Image Movie File Name. The other extremely important procedure is to make sure that the image you are using is found in the Sockets Folder. In other words, the image file has to be in the same folder where the Pixel Grains Plugin lives. Here in the Electric Image Sockets Folder. Let's click OK and get out of the plug-in for a moment and I'll open the image which is driving this effect. It's very small. You don't need a lot of resolution here with the image itself. This is actually a small movie and I'll go ahead and scrub through it. Rectangles of different sizes and shades of gray. What's important to notice here is that the shapes are all brightening at different times. The timing of this animation is what's going to make our Pixel Grains Effect look good. Now, if you're wondering how this movie was made, I can tell you that it was created in After Effects. You can use solids or even a type of fractal noise to make this kind of image. Now, I want to open the move of the Pixel Grains setup that I previously rendered and play it. Great. It looks like buildings are being constructed before our eyes, like some sort of CG time lapse. Now, let's get back to our controls. On the right you have Scale Fields and this will set the size of your Pixel Grains Object. The greater the Y Scale, the higher the extrusion. In the middle is the pop-up for the extruded shape. Right now it's set to Cube but it can be any of these objects. Let's change it to Cylinder. To the left we have Scale Controls for the extruded objects. Let's shrink it down to 0.2 for each, close that and render a snapshot. Now instead of thick blocks, each of the buildings seems to be made out of rebar, really thin cylinders. Let's take a closer look at the top view and we can also see it in the camera view. One more trip to the controls. Let me change these values back and set the shape back to Cube. The plug-in requires a movie to drive the extrusion but you can set Start and End Frames to turn on and off the plug-in. Over here the zero value simply tells Pixel Grains where in the 256 shades of gray that are possible to start the extrusion. Let's set it to 100 and click OK and I'll turn off the ground plane and we'll render. Now we have an animation that looks like it's eating away at the buildings and then raising them up. Of course, a lot of the fun to this is having a good image for the plug-in to use. And, of course, the more interesting the movie that's driving the effect, the better the animation created by Pixel Grains.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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