Working away on a model of an iron bench i started looking a bit more closely at the iron work i was creating.. Hmm now what if i add a volumetric light ?

So here it is, a different perspective but still a rusty old bench !!


http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/marakeshpollen.jpg

wow. Thats like the 3d movie quality stuff.

Actually it is 3D. I was making the end of a bench and added a cube in the middle. I then took a black and white image of a middle eastern lattice effect and added this to the alpha texture channel and inverted it

the alpha channel acts like a stencil, uninverted and by default it says to the 3d program ( or in fact a 2d program) anything that is white is 100 % opaque and anything that is black is 100% transparent

You can off course choose any color for the alpha and this is the basis of "bluescreen" filmimg in for example the gollum scenes in lord of the rings

You create a blue room/scene - erything is totally blue, you then have an actor dressed in a costume that has no blue at all. You film the action

In a compositing ptogram you set the alpha channel to make the blue transparent and then layer your film of an actor onto whatever background you choose

Alternatively you make the actor totally blue, sploshing around in a river, alpha out the actor and add you computer generated gollum

So in my case the black and white image applied to the cube "cut out" the lattice, i then simply added a light and made it a visible volumetric light with some computer generated noise and a lens flare. I also added the artifacts that you get when lights shine off the camera lens

Sounds complicated but is in fact very easy

Here is an example of the above technique, this time i took a drawing done by Escher and added that as the alpha channel for a cube, added a floor to catch the shadows and a vol light

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/escube1.jpg

I'm guessing you did that with 3D Studio? I am very new to the program and I am having a hard time finding my way around even with tutorials. I understand what an aplpha channel is (I used in some LEGO movies I made) but I don't undertand how to apply it to anything in 3DS.

Very very cool images Paul,
fancy providing some tutorials on how you did those? I'd love to enhance my 3D work.

Rob

Pretty cool there.... I'm impressed. A nice warm feel and an almost freaky tone to it... Impressive...