OT: Question for Boris Red users

flippin wrote on 2/11/2005, 2:52 PM
I am totally enthralled with the awesome power of Boris' titling and FX capabilities. The learning curve has been somewhat steep... but I am an amateur--if I can figure this stuff out I guess probably any regular at this site could learn it.

One of the coolest things I've been having fun with is: Learned a bit about Mercator maps--these are things like world maps in 2D, everyone has seen these. Once you have a proper Mercator map of something, saved as a jpeg image for example, you can import the 2D image into Boris and convert it with a click into a spherical object. Thus, if you do this with a Mercator map of the world you actually generate a world globe that you can spin, bounce, fragment, whatever you like to do with a sphere.

So it turns out that there are ways of generating what amount to 2D Mercator maps of other spherical objects, e.g., baseballs. If anyone is interested let me know and I will steer you to an excellent tutorial on how to make a baseball.

But this made me wonder, and who better than experienced Boris users to ask--is there software available, or even a collection of ready-made 2D images, that would be useful for making or obtaining the 2D maps that convert to various types of spherical objects?

The list of possibilities might be pretty long but would certainly include patterns with specialized symmetry or no symmetry, e.g., various map styles of the Earth, baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, a peeled whole orange, etc, or even patterns with high symmetry, i.e., golf balls, soccer balls.

I also hope to experiment a little with projecting Mercator maps of "close-to-spherical" objects on to Boris spheres--e.g., it might be really cool to turn a human head into a primitive spherical object with this technique.

Anyone have experience with any of this?

Best regards,

Lee

Comments

theceo wrote on 2/11/2005, 3:26 PM
mapping simple objects (Spheres, cubes, etc) and text with jpeg has been happening in 3D for at least 10 years now

you can have a lot of fun with it

glad to see how much you like 3D mapping, I've had a lot of fun with it over the years



flippin wrote on 2/11/2005, 4:40 PM
Thanks, ceo,

I have no problems with mapping text to primitive objects in Boris--that's pretty straightforward.

Also in Boris, and probably many other programs, it is easy to convert any given 2d planar image to a 3d sphere. Again, no problem. The trick is to come up with a truely useful 2d image so that the finished sphere closely mimics something like a baseball or Earth when you start rotating it, right?

What's not so clear to me is, after the decade or so of experience that you mentioned, whether there is good software for generating true 2d Mercator maps of surfaces like baseballs, the Earth, a basketball, or an unpeeled orange.

I tried estimating what a basketball 2d Mercator map should look like in PhotoShop and imported the jpeg to Boris and wrapped it around a sphere and played with it. The effect was fair--good enough to amuse me and my 10-year-old for awhile, but definitely not professional looking.

On the other hand, a jpeg of any true Mercator projection of Earth converts a primitive sphere into a very professional looking world globe. And the lengthy baseball tutorial (11 pages!) worked very, very well--my baseball looks awesome and I can simultaneously spin it and bounce it while I rotate text around it like the rings of Saturn.

Which is exactly why I am becoming awestruck and would like to get deeper into this--but, a little help please, if you already know how to do these things more generally. Does anyone sell ready-made 2d maps suitable for wrapping to a 3d sphere? If not, what is the best software available for designing these?

Thanks, and best regards,

Lee

nickle wrote on 2/11/2005, 4:57 PM
Have a look here

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-a-mercator

to see how to do it in Photoshop.

I didn't read it all but it looked like it had your name on it.:)
flippin wrote on 2/11/2005, 5:14 PM
Thanks, nickle--that looks like a really interesting tutorial. After I've had a bit of time to digest what he is saying there I'll probably be back with more novice questions about it.

Meantime, if any of you guys or gals out there were asked to quickly make a 3d basketball that looks good, what would you use?

Thanks, and best regards,

Lee
nickle wrote on 2/11/2005, 5:25 PM
I use cool3d to make things.

Also there are sites where you can download 3d objects (like basketballs).

I once made a 3d pig riding a 3d bicycle and put it in a video.

http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/toys.asp
theceo wrote on 2/11/2005, 6:13 PM
the people that do most of our 3D would know, I've played around with some of their programs and most have baseballs and earths in them, so the maps are already done.

We had some maps for all the planets in our solar system on a project we did a while back and we decide to just use Nasa images of planets instead of making 3D planets per se

Some of the maps looked ok and some didn't

The inner planets look ok, but the other planets aren't mapped too good, guess they don't know really what they look like that well