Stone Design Forums

Hi everyone,

This is a tutorial done entirely in iMaginator. I won't give this away, it's a very fun effect, and you can do it easily yourself, as you'll see.

This movie was recorded at one frame per second, and I'm going pretty slow as this goes on, so no need to rush as you watch this, and feel free to watch as many times as you want.

http://homepage.mac.com/russconte/cooltexteffect.mov

Enjoy, and comments are always welcome!

Russ Conte

This one if fantastic, inspired.

Russ could you do a commentary as well?
Could you make available the final .imaj file for download? See the movie play with the file.
What did you use to record the screen?

Andrew any chance of having these added to the Stone site? I think they would be a great addition and give the PS sceptics something to think about.

These are fantastic Russ! And definitely some cool effects to add the Effects library.

The easiest way for me to add cool stuff like this is to add it to the iMaginator Samples page - (russ will have his own section!)

BTW, the upcoming version of iMaginator has all the "Blank Canvases" built into the Images library.

I'll add link to those fab tutorials after I get back tonight or tomorrow!

And voila - where you can find this and the other fine tutorials by Russ:

http://www.stone.com/iMaginator/Features.html#MOVIES

Russ,

I was amazed at the Cool Text Effects movie you made several weeks ago. I have finally had the time to sit down and follow it step-by-step in iMaginator. Thank you.

Can you tell us, did you just stumble across this raised text effect, or did you know what you were trying to create and then figure out how to do it?

Could you (or someone else if they want to contribute) explain exactly what each step does? OK, I understand what Text does. But what about Mask By Color, what does that do, exactly? And Height Field From - what in the world it that? Etc.

Is there some sort of primer I can read on the Core Image terminology?

Thanks,

Hi Roger,

Glad you liked the movie and the effect. I have to admit, it's quite amazing.

I found the effect in (get this!) the help section of iMaginator. Personally, I find Help to be one of the great secrets of using my Macs. I read through the entire help section, and when I saw that effect, I read the instructions and played around with it for a while until I got it.

Look up Shaded Material in iMaginator's help, and you'll find it there.

The other thing that I did was Control-Click on the iMaginator icon in my applications folder, and opened up the package. It was there that I found a folder of images that included the sphere (and other images and effects) that is used in the effect.

So to answer your other question, I would suggest the Help in iMaginator as a resource to learn what CoreImage does. I learned quite a bit as I read it through, and I'm still learning as I read and re-read help sections.

I can honestly say that one of my big secrets to being a computer user is to read the Help screens. I never know what I might find there

Thanks again for the kind words. Good luck with iMaginator!!

Russ Conte

Rus,

I have been looking through the iMaginator pdf manual, but never gleaned as much usefull stuff as you have. The pictures help me more that the descriptions.

Support StoneWorks... Seashore doesn't have support for CI yet.. waiting for Chocoflop to get a little further.... masking via CI seems to be pretty good.... will have to try it more... but, i'll have to shell out few clams for iMaginator .... will do.