the garden hose, painter, and qtvr panoramas

I just love those little QTVR panoramas. You can do such cool stuff with them using the Garden Hose and Painter. In fact, that's why I'm writing this. The kind folks here at Visual Magic suggested I do a brief article explaining how to create QTVR panoramas using these tools.

Let me get the disclaimers out of the way. First off, I'm sure that there are newer and better tools out there. But, like most people, I'm long on want and short on where-with-all. So, if it ain't free then I likely don't have it - at least until my credit cards heal some. My point being, you'll forgive any inaccuracies regarding current tools and the like.

Most people think QTVR is exclusively for photography and 3D. I dont. Ive found it quite malleable to my nefarious 2D paint intentions. In fact, painting QTVR panoramas is really quite simple, at least if you use Painter and the Garden Hose. You just select all, define pattern and paint away. It's easy as pie!

For my part, I like throw in a little Bryce every now and then, just for scale. I guess Bryce can do the QTVR Macarena all by itself, but you have to know how. Other than doing a 360 degree render, I don't. Besides, what's the fun in that? I want to get my hands dirty. I want to make nature through the touch of my hand. So, this exercise emphasizes Garden Hose nozzles while adding just enough Bryce to give it that spicy, Southwestern tang.

Personally, I think the Garden Hose and Bryce are kissing cousins when it comes to QTVR panoramas. Individually, they both do a yeoman's job, but together they make for something special. You whip out a terrain and seamlessly paint in your flora. Where will it end? Nowadays, my photographer friends look at me with jaundiced eye. They're convinced I'm taking away their living.

With that not in mind, let's get started. The first thing to do is open a file. Since that file will, sooner or later, have to conform to QTVR Panorama standards we might as well start with the correct proportions. Let's see, Apple's little Make QTVR Panorama utility says the file should be evenly divisible by 4. That's easy enough, but the fact is to look halfway decent the width to height ratio should be nearer to 4:1.

There's no hard and fast width to height rule that I'm aware of. For example, the Bryce terrain in Mescalaro was rendered in QTVR Panorama mode and came out near 960 X 292 pixels. Using the terrain as a measure then, I opened a new file in Painter at those same dimensions. I figured the folks at Meta know more about these ratios than I do. That's not a safe assumption, however.

Once I had the terrain rendered, I did a second mask render so I could precisely select the terrain from the background. Why? Because I wanted to use the Garden Hose cloud nozzles to make a 'seamless' sky on the fly. Besides, using a mask tool to cut away a Bryce sky was an ineffective time waster.

Now this mask render stuff seems to require Photoshop. In PS I can drag and drop my alpha channel mask directly from the mask file into my terrain file and it applies just right, automatically. That allowed me to save the file and open it in Painter with the mask exactly in place. Once in Painter, I made the terrain a layer and started painting.

At the beginning of the paint process, I put the terrain layer in a safe place. Then, as needed, I can duplicate and drop a copy onto the background. I'd do that so whenever I paint some new grass or trees using the Add To check box on the Nozzles palette, they have the terrain background colors along their edges. That's how you avoid those nasty halos that sometimes occur when you convert your nozzle image to a layer.

Let me say a few words about this halo thing. When you paint with nozzles using the Add To or Add To Mask check box (to make floaters), you almost always want to paint on the same background you intend to use in your final image. Otherwise, you quickly find that the edges or shadows of your nozzle layers contrast and look hinky; especially when you move them over different or darker background image. That's because the edges (or shadows) will always pick-up some of what's underneath.

Okay, now where was I? So, now I've got a terrain layer dropped on a white background and nothing else. The first thing to do is to make the background a pattern tile. To do that, you do a Select All and Define Pattern commands (if you don't know what these commands are, you'll have to look them up in the Painter manual or wait for the full PDF version of this tutorial comes out).

Why make it a pattern tile? Cause with pattern tiles you can paint off one edge and the media wraps and applies onto the other edge. What this means is that now, when I paint grass off the right edge, it comes on the left edge and seamlessly. Get the picture? When you put the two edges together using the QTVR utility, you won't be able to tell where the right edge ends and the left edge begins. It's Way Cool!

The rest is simple really. Using Add To or Add to Mask (sorry, but I prefer Painter 4), you can paint seamlessly off one edge and onto another. By that means, you can convert your grass, reeds, or whatever to a tiling floater. And why convert it to a tiling floater? Cause that let's us employ compositing. Through compositing, we can act on each layer independent of the others to sharpen or adjust colors, etc.

Are you still with me? Hang on tight cause there's a few hairpins just ahead. You'll find that tiling from right to left is great. The problem is, you also tile from top to bottom. That means when you paint grass that bleeds off the bottom of the picture, the darned grass tiles right into the sky at the top. Here's what to do about that.

My image is 292 pixels high and the grass is coming down from the top. How do I stop it? I can't. Instead, I make the image bigger. I add 300 pixels to the top of the image using the Adjust Canvas Size. That way, when I spray off the bottom the stuff coming down from the top doesn't go into my image. After I make it a floater, I erase the top part of the floater and Trim it down to size.

Next, I paint the flora onto my terrain background picking up the selections and making layers as I go. When I've pretty much got what I want, I stop and group these floaters sorting them by fore, mid, and background. Remember that first terrain background we put away? I make real sure that I put that terrain floater at the very back of the bottom group of floaters.

We're almost done. If you're using Painter 5, just crop your oversize image down to 960 X 292. If you using P4, then make a new image file at the original 960 X 292 final size. Then select all of the floater groups from the working file, copy, and then paste them into the new file. Position the floaters the way you want and deselect them. Leave the floaters visible, however. Now, with the paint brush tool selected, do another Select All and Define Pattern. Why? Cause you're going to paint the sky.

For my part, I just did a gradation fill for the blue part of the sky. Problem is, gradation fills won't tile so you have to apply the gradation from dead vertical, top down 90 degrees angle. You control that by positioning with the little dot on wheel of the gradation palette. If you want to vary the left to right concentration of blue, then you'll have to use the airbrush or some other brush.

Once the blue part was done, I loaded a small cloud nozzle from Garden Hose 2.2 and painted away. With the floaters visible, I could see the horizon line and used ever bigger nozzles as the sky moved closer overhead. Better still, I didn't have to worry about painting off the top of the image or onto the terrain because the sky was behind those floaters. The only part of the sky that was visible was the part I wanted to show.

When I got something I liked, I stopped and dropped the terrain background. Then I selected the little hand tool and holding the shift key down (Mac), moved my tiling image to the left until the terrain's seam became visible. Selecting a cloning brush and doing a Control + Click on a likely suspect, I painted away that ugly little blemish. (I could have dropped a tree floater there as well since once the floater is dropped, it tiles to).

I used the Hand (+shift) to move the image back into it's original position. With the one seam gone, I checked the position of the remaining floaters and dropped them too. Next, I rotated the image 90 degrees counter clockwise and saved it as a Pict file. Finding that little QTVR Make Panorama utility, I dragged and dropped the file onto it and clicked OK. Next thing I knew, it was done.

A few minor details; if you've downloaded QuickTime 3, you're in trouble. MoviePlayer 3 will not let you save or export your panorama unless you send Steve Jobs another $29. If you have an old System CD, you should find MoviePlayer 2.5+ on it. Use that instead cause it's free. You'll find the QTVR Panorama utilities at www.apple.com/quicktime/developers/tools.html#qtvr.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot the pine trees. How'd I do them? That's in another (not yet released) tutorial for Garden Hose 2.2 owners. For more info, see www.gardenhose.com.

Have fun.

click here to download a short quicktime showing the final result of this article


Dennis Berkla is president of DigArts Software and the creator of the Garden Hose products (www.gardenhose.com). He can be reached by email at digarts@gardenhose.com.


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