omino pixel blog

Early this month, we visited the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, featuring patterns and clothing by the Hawaiian designer Alfred Shaheen. Great stuff! Yeah, I have a closet full of Hawaiian shirts.

(Show show goes til August 8, worth visiting. On the first Friday of the month, many of the galleries on First Street in San Jose, CA are open late, definitely a nice night out.)

Since I adore repetition, and halftoning, I got to wondering if I could recreate some of the patterns programmatically. The “Omino Stamper” filter runs in After Effects and attempts to do this.

download ==> omino_stamp.pbk, an After Effects filter.

The idea is pretty simple: draw a “stamp image” in a pattern which can be affected by the source image. It’s a little bit like a particle effect, but more mechanical.

Here’s the controls and few examples, which look nothing like Hawaiian shirts.

A quick rundown:

• The pattern- settings adjust the stamping grid
• The stamp- settings adjust orientation and size of the stampimage image
• The stampOverlaps setting controls how many nearby stamps are computed for each pixel; slows down the render a bit but is necessary for closely-spaced stamping. (If you see missing corners and such, increase this setting. (Those of you familiar with Pixel Bender will immediately apprehend why this is so.
• The affectsStampSizeAmount, affectsStampColorAmount, and affectsStampRotationAmount settings control the halftoning features of the filter.

Here’s a basic stamp:

Next, we adjust the bricking a little, to make it less square-y:

And let the color of the underlying image affect the stamp color:

How about affect the rotation, instead of the color? Kinda wild:

Or back to basics, let the underlying image affect the stamping-size:

Here’s a festive little animation playing with the effect a bit, and does include a Tiki god or two.

download ==> omino_stamp.pbk, an After Effects filter.

Enjoy!

Easy Rain

Here’s a cute one. Nothing deep or advanced, but it was fun. It’s a way to get a very simple and cheap “rain” in After Effects.

1. Take a tiny bit of Noise, and blur it in one direction with Fast Blur.
2. This makes very, very dim “streaks”. Use Threshold to make them visible again.
3. Fast Blur it a little in both directions to make the edges smooth again.
4. Rotate the whole layer, for angled rain.

Easy peasy!

Here’s the AE setup for it. Trivial! Small adjustments of the parameters can get all sorts of interesting results.

What about CC Rain?

Well you know, apart from the joy (cussedness) of doing it the hard way… CC Rain makes relatively slow well-defined rain streaks. Depending what look you like, combining CC Rain with the more random movement described above is pretty nice, too.

If you like, here’s the self-contained tiny AE project. ==> just_rain.aep

Just an administrative note. I’ve got a set of free After Effects plugins available. The old web-page links were a bit confused, especially with respect to which ones work on After Effects CS3 and CS4, and which are for After Effects CS5.

The new link is http://omino.com/pixelblog/omino-ae-plugins/, and also appears as a “Page” in the blog nav column, and should be much clearer.