Suppose you need to fake an overhead shot of a moving airplane, with the camera locked on the plane? One way to do this is to use a photo as the base for a seamless tiling image, then offset the seamless tile as an object background to animate it. Go grab a bunch of broccoli, since it can look quite a bit like foliage, and photograph it (mainly the florets) a few times. Note the lighting angle.

Decide on your camera and sunlight angles in Luxology modo and render the plane to a bitmap format that supports transparency. TIFF, TGA, PSD and PNG are all examples of formats that both Adobe Photoshop and most editors can read. Gauge your render to your final output size: if your frames are 2K, then render out to 2K files.

Luxology imageSynth operates as a Photoshop standard plug-in and makes seamless tiling images a snap to create with a "rubber stamp" and wrap-around window paradigm. imageSynth reads and writes transparency, so it’s a good idea to prep your image by erasing unwanted areas before loading it. Here, I’m masking one of two background photos and matching lighting; the outdoor photography of the broccoli and the lighting in the modo render aren’t quite perfect. The Photo Filter command undr->Image->Adjustments makes this easy.

Use a new document size in Photoshop that’s about twice the size of the frame you want to animate. Then, define a transparent background. In imageSynth, click the Add button and then load one or more images you want to composite into a seamless tile. Pick an image from the list, and then click in the work area to add a "chunk" of the image you masked. You can rotate each chunk by Ctrl/cmd+scroll-wheeling, and you can scale a chunk before you "paste" it into the work area.

It’s a good idea to vary your images and to scale and rotate to keep the background from becoming too static. If you scroll the work area, you’ll see that imageSynth is wrapping the chunks to the document edges. You might want to leave some transparency to later paint in a roof top or other forest-type piece of interest. When you’re done, click Apply.

When you’re in Photoshop, assemble the composition you want to animate on separate layers. Adobe After Effects 6.5 or later will import separate image layers to the Project palette by choosing Composition when you import. To create a shadow on the forest, Ctrl/cmd+click the plane’s thumbnail on the Layers palette so it will load as a selection. Next, put a layer behind it, fill the selection with deep green or black and then put the layer in Multiply blend mode at about 60 percent.

A shadow is necessary to anchor the plane to the scene, but the shadow shouldn’t be static. Duplicate the original shadow layer twice, use the Glass filter on each copy and then use the Layer Mask or the plain Eraser tool in combination with a textured brush tip to partially remove different areas on each shadow layer. When you’re animating the layers in your video editor, cross-fade between them to make the shadows appear to move as the plane passes over the moving landscape.

In After Effects, import the PSD file as a composition (not Footage) and a folder with all the layers broken out will appear in the Project pane. Stage the layers so they’re back to front, and then set the opacity for the shadow layers’ Multiply mode at about 60 percent. Stage the opacities so they cross-fade and modulate opacity at irregular intervals along the timeline.

Because the background broccoli forest seamlessly tiles, and it’s larger than the other elements, you will want to animate its position across the timeline. At your start point, match the background layer’s bottom edge with the bottom of the frame. Then, at your end point, match the background’s top edge with the top edge of the frame. Mathematically, if you render the frames now, you can duplicate the footage over and over and the second to last frame perfectly matches the first frame. Then edit out the last frame to create the loop.

Alternatively, if your modeling program has an animation engine, you can skip video editing entirely. Put your finished imageSynth texture on a cylinder behind your model, give the material enough luminosity so shadows aren’t cast on the cylinder and perform a 359-degree rotation for x amount of frames. Either way, you can pull off a convincing aerial shot that’s good for three or four seconds of suspended disbelief on a very affordable budget. Here are three stills from the finished animation.

Gary David Bouton
Co-founder
www.TheBoutons.com
ph. 315.622.1344
gary@theboutons.com

Gary David Bouton is the author of over 20 books on graphics applications, including the entire Inside Adobe Photoshop series (New Riders Publishing) and Photoshop Elements for Dummies (Joseph Wiley & Sons). A professional illustrator, Gary has a background in television as an advertising Art Director and has composed and performed two scores for short films.

Gary and his wife Barbara host The Boutons.com, a site devoted to all forms of communications – graphics, photography, animation – and work on user support through The Pixel Dust Forum, a part of The Boutons’ site.

Luxology imageSynth is a plug-in that works within Adobe Photoshop to create seamless textures and high-resolution images from digital photo sources (that you supply) by using advanced image synthesis algorithms. This is not synthetic procedural texture generation – imageSynth is building up a new tiling image from the image chunks that you supply it. For example, if you have an image of pebbles from your favorite beach, and want a tiling version that has more beach glass in it, you can emphasize those sections of the image that have glass in them and imageSynth will create the desired image for you. In some cases, you’re done right there. By combining it with a modeling program (my fave is Luxology’s modo software), Adobe Photoshop and a video editor, you can create a scene, such as the one here in this tutorial, using a simple animation technique.

Luxology imageSynth, Luxology modo (or any other modeling program), Adobe Photoshop