April 2005 Archives

UPDATE 7/30/2009

/UPDATE

The two most important brushes in Photoshop are the hard-edged circle and the soft-edged circle.

The most important tool is a tablet with a pen.

Set your brush's opacity to respond to pen pressure.

Most things in the world have hard edges. You'll use your hard-edged brush a lot.

Many color transitions on or within objects are soft. You may find your soft-edged brush comes in handy in those cases -- but not as handy as you think -- don't over rely on it.

You can get a huge amount (maybe even most) of your work done with with a pressure-sensitive hard-edged circle.

How do you blend one color into another with a hard-edged brush?

Use a light touch (low pressure) and paint this color into that, and that color back into this.

Your two best hot keys are the size changers, ] for bigger size and [ for smaller size, and the eye dropper key (alt on Windows)

Don't eye-dropper colors from photos. Try to estimate them by eye. Feel free to sample your own colors from elsewhere in your painting.

Personally, I prefer not to let pressure control brush size; only opacity.

If you use the pressure sensitivity feature for any brush settings, take the time to go into the Wacom software and adjust the pressure sensitivity of the tip.

There is a slider that remaps pressure values through a curve. I like to set my pen tip to be one notch to the right of (firmer than) the default setting. I find this brings out the subtlety of the light touch, and helps prevent the tip from slamming from "barely on" to "fully on" without a smooth transition.

Using opacity falloff to model color mixing isn't "true" color mixing. The opacity blending method will only take you so far. If you feel there is a step missing in your blend, you can "help it out" by sticking the color into the blend yourself.

There are other ways to more accurately model digital color mixing within Photoshop. I talk more about that in my Digital Color Mixing with Photoshop post. Here's a sneak preview:

I don't actually use "multiply mixing" that much in Photoshop. It's not convenient. When I paint, I lay down direct color and opacity-blend it as described here. If I need to help a color mix along manually by introducing a third color, I do so.

If you don't like this style of painting and color mixing, look into Corel Painter as an alternative (and in many ways superior) digital painting application.

And don't miss Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox.

Need to render that climactic "end of act 3" dash from the exploding building or self-destructing mothership?

With Final Gather, you can make some nice rim lighting.

I attended the unveiling of Pixar's Renderman for Maya product at the Gnomon school in Hollywood last night. The event was well-attended and the presentation took place in a sound stage large enogh to accomodate a large screen video projection system which showed the software to good effect.

Maya users looking for a sophisticated alternative to the native Maya renderer have been able to use Mental Ray for some time now, and at no additional cost. The Renderman route was until now a relatively expensive and somewhat more difficult one.

Before the advent of Renderman for Maya, the "friendliest" front-end for Renderman within a Maya context, to my knowledge, was the SLIM plugin. The basic workflow for SLIM users entailed leaving the Maya renderer as soon as possible, and using SLIM-based shaders and mapping coordinate systems developed not within the Maya hypershade, but within a node-based environment known as a SLIM palette.

Maya for Renderman obviates the need for this additional shader design environment. Maya users will now build Renderman shaders within the Maya hypershade. The "feeling" of using Renderman for Maya appears to be similar to that of using Mental Ray. The familiar Maya interface remains largely the same, with the addition of new Renderman-specific tabs and attributes.

Renderman has many well-known strengths. It looks great, and (having been forged in the fires of Pixar's hardcore production demands) can handle complex displacements and extensive camera and object motion blur without suffering a big performance hit. Renderman executes all of its particle rendering within software, which allows the user to do more sophisticated, shader-driven control than does some of Maya's (hardware-rendered) particles. Renderman's "Deep Shadows" technique gives the Maya user access to beautifully rendered shadows from particles, fur, and hair.

This is a tempting plug-in with some small drawbacks:

Unlike Mental Ray, Renderman for Maya costs an additional $995/seat.

While Renderman does have a subsurface scattering algorithm, and an occlusion shader, it does not seem, on the whole, to place as much emphasis on Global Illumination techniques as does Mental Ray.

Renderman for Maya is designed to put the production-proven power of Renderman into the hands of the small to medium PC- and Mac-based CG houses. Pixar has no immediate support for a Linux version.