Alert #2 for those interested in Carrara

[BobHill]

Doc,
Since I've not done anything in Carrera yet, I sure can't accurately answer your question, however remember that depth is set my you in Designer, and the tones of gray (256 steps) determine how the carving rounds and how sharpley it cuts to depths. I look for Carrera to set those curving gradients like shown in 3d and it certainly should do that.
Bob

[cycollins]

...not trying to stall. I thought I answered that question a post or two ago, but perhaps there is some misunderstanding as to what problem Carrara is appropriate to help with. Carrara will help you take 3D data that you either create in a 3D authoring program (including Carrara itself) or that you acquire from a 3D content site (like www.daz3d.com itself) and create CW patterns. As I mentioned, the only other program you would need is some photo editing program that can import .psd files (i.e. PhotoShop, PhotoPaint, PaintShop Pro, Painter, CorelPaint, etc.). The reason you need it is that Carrara can allows you to create a scene and then render it from a camera-point-of-view and create a depth-map (i.e. a CW pattern) in an auxiliary channel of a PhotoShop document. You need a paint program to import this document, extract the depth-map and save it as a .jpg or .bmp to be imported into your pattern library (actually, you should never use .jpg, but that's another issue).

It will NOT help you go from photographic data to CW patterns. That is an unrelated task and you need a different set of tools for that. I hope you all don't think that the lovely model for my little wooden manequin was taken from a photograph of a girl that I hung by her wrists. She was entirely synthetic from start to finish. Her name is Jessi G2 and she comes from e-frontier's Poser 7 (she likes long virtual walks and simulated bubble baths and has a degree in digital phys ed from UCLA). I exported her from Poser into Carrara and rendered her to a height map, using the method described here and other places.

There has been a lot of discussion about how to carve data from photographs. There are two ways of doing this - one is to carve it with exceedingly low relief (small "height" value). That way, you are simply "scratching" the surface of some material, creating different kinds of scratches for dark and light zones. You can do it from a positive or negative of your photograph with different results and many people have produced fine examples of this process. That's the easier way, and a copy of any paint program will stand you in good stead for converting a color image to grayscale for this purpose and saving it as .bmp.

The staggeringly hard way is to try to reconstruct 3D data from a photograph. There are some programs that will help you with this, but they are fairly special-purpose and they tend to be quite expensive. One is called Canoma (not to be confused with Carrara). It is specialized for reconstructing architecture from a series of discrete pictures from different points of view on
buildings. You'll have to find that program on eBay or something, since I have intimate knowledge that it is no longer available (Adobe bought it to be integrated into some product that never realized, so it sits on a shelf gathering dust - literally). There's an inexpensive product called FaceShop Pro that helps a user taylor a 3D model of a human head to match a photograph. It's available from daz3d (it can be found by searching), but it doesn't work very well - at least I haven't been able to squeeze any value out of it. Poser 7 has a similar function built into it. There are some research-oriented efforts out on the web to recover 3D data from a picture by making some assumptions about the effect of light on shapes and inferring the geometry of a scene from the shadows and shading in a photograph (the opposit of rendering). The key-word to google on is "shape from shading", which will also bring up a few retail products that attempt this feat. Basically, they are all a little dicey. It's a hard problem because you lose 3D information when you stamp a scene onto a flat photograph. Getting that information back requires a lot of context information, inferences, assumptions, heuristics and just plain-old getting-lucky. It also generally requires a lot of interaction with a user because computers still aren't good at knowing where an object ends and the background begins in a photograph.

There are some special-case photographs that are virtually depth-maps to begin with. One that is well-known to those who like to restore molding and relief. It inolves taking a sculpture with medium to high relief, painting it in matte black or dark gray, and immersing it in a light mixture of milk in water. Taking a picture of this is practically a depth map. The reason is that the matte surface and the milky mixture diffuses all incoming light, so that you get little or no shading effects from specific sources on surfaces (i.e. all the light in the vat with the milk mixture is evenly spread around, scattered and refracted. Also, the milk mixture will make it so that the deeper a point on the sculpture is in the immersion vat, the closer it will be to milky-gray and the closer a point is to the surface, the closer it will be to matte black. Thus the picture consists of a lot of gray-scale values between black and light-gray. This is practically the definition of a CW pattern. In a pinch, you might be able to get away with this trick for a small figurine in plastic (a Barbie or GI Joe), even without painting them, as long as the object is a single color and you can convert it to gray-scale and adjust the contrast in a paint program.

However, there is no general-purpose program that will take you directly from any arbitrary picture to a CW pattern. At least not any of which I'm aware and I'm nosey about such things. Sorry for the bad news.

Enough of an answer?

cycollins

[DocWheeler]

Cy,
Thank you very much for the details. I have used CAD programs to build things from houses to an entertainment center. I use PhotoShop to detail photos, and work with other software to create applications for people to run a local government - so its not that I don't understand a little about things that software can do. Its more like hearing raves about something then finding that there were limitations that I did not attend to - like some folks here finding that G-code does not work in Designer. I am no expert in graphics but I do not expect that I could afford a software package that would take a picture and produce exact heights/gradients to import into Designer directly.
My desire is to find the simplest combination of programs to allow me to manipulate elements of a picture into gradients (or heights in my visual conception of what I want). Of course, these various elements themselves would have to have ranges of grayscales to position them in relation to other elements. That is why I pmed you about this earlier.
It would appear that Carrara would not be appropriate for my intended use.
Again, thanks for your response.

[cycollins]

Well, don't I feel silly. I got a ribbing in another thread for speaking geek to a fellow programmer, so I guess I was over compensating. It comes down to the same thing unfortunately. I don't really know of a good program for adjusting contours, other than a good general-purpose paint program. The problem I find is that designing brushes to do the right thing in terms of contours. I actually wouldn't recommend PhotoShop, since it is more focused on the publishing work-flow (taking photos, doctoring them and putting them in a page context). Maybe "Painter X", which is now owned by Corel, since it has physically-pased simulated paint and brushes.

There are some expensive, special-purpose digital sculpting programs from a company called HapTek (I think - maybe HapTech). It consists of a haptic digitizing arm with and a volumetric simulation of a slab of clay on the computer. You move a virtual sculpting tool, which is held in the arm, which gives force feed-back, based on where the virtual tool-tip is relative to the virtual clay. It's pretty cool. The company is always at SigGraph and the Game Developer's Conference because it is commonly used to create or at least digitize 3D characters, made by real sculptors, who work in traditional media. That would be one way to create, modify and otherwise manipulate contours. Just make a slab of virtual clay that has the dimensions of your wood and then scoop out or smooth your relief directly. I first saw the system three or four years ago, so it might be quite inexpensive now. I'm going to SigGraph again this year. I'll give a report if it looks promising.

I've been thinking about writing a special-purpose drawing program, just for creating bevelled curves. You would design a bevel cross-section in an editor and then draw on the surface of a virtual volume. The bevel would be maintained as perpendicular to the direction of motion of the mouse, so that if for example, you would draw out a circle, you would end up with a conical bevel. You get the idea. Something like that might be handy for quick-and-dirty contour creation, followed up by some finesse in PhotoShop or Painter. But since it only exists in my brain right now, it isn't of much use to anyone, myself included.

cycollins

[BobHill]

I guess I'd better apologize also, Cy. When I took look at Carrera, I'm doing it through eyes that are very experienced in graphics and even some early 3d and animation (Bryce/Poser) and being very experienced in 2d vector, the use of Carrera was just what I was looking for, at a price that is certainly affordable. For those that are experienced (or willing to learn) something like CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator or Xara, I'd think that you'd also be able to handle Carrera and put it to use for Designer. I suspect that since Cy has had some experience, and perhaps when I get a handle on it, instructions can be handed down for at least some of the simple tasks we need for CarveWright,. BUT ... don't buy it if money is too tight, or with the thought that it's going to be automatic. In that case you might well be better off purchasing "ready mades," which seem to be growing in numbers very nicely. For my use, however, (fancy stern pieces on wooden ship models .. from scratch), I believe it'll be just the ticket .. and in any event, worth the price of admission to find out if it is.

Bob

[DocWheeler]

Cy,
Don't feel silly or anything like that. I recently bought a program ($10) that was supposed to help with gradients only to find out that its Import capability was limited to a single format used by a sister program for $XXX.
I was lusting for the mpc of Kenm810's sailing ship and found a black and white drawing that I really liked. I pulled it into various programs (Photoshop and CorelDraw) and really made messes of it.
Maybe the learning curve is just a lot steeper than I anticipated.

[BobHill]

Cy,

I just got Carrara Pro 5.1 installed and printed out the 654 page Manual. Now to do a little studying, particularly on Chapter 8, working with 2D images. Have you found that to be the essence of what we need to work with?

Bob

[liquidguitars]

I just got Carrara Pro 5.1 installed and printed out the 654 page Manual. Now to do a little studying

Some light reading over the weekend?

LG

[rjustice]

ahhhh, nothing like the fine reading of a computer software manual

Be sure to fill us in on what ya learn Bob...

Ron

[BobHill]

I will, indeed, Ron. The manual filled three 1½" loose leaf folders, no less.

Bob