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Brad's Kalypso Site - Effects

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Smear Moving Video
Montages
Trails
(static background)
Slabs
Light Sources on
Transform Engines
Pixellation
Black and White
or Sepia Tone
More Effects
Creating Slabs

A Slab is a Transform Engine with "Thickness". The depth is created by using another Transform Engine at right-angles, just like a cube, but with different sizes on each face. With the Axis of Rotation in the centre of the Slab, each TE moves a different distance from this centre (unlike a cube, where each face moves the same distance away from the centre).


To work out the distance to move each TE, the general rule is to move a channel in Z-Source space by the negative crop value of the adjacent channel.

The easiest way is to imagine that you are spinning a tiny cube in the centre and that your TE channels are attached to it by invisible wires. So if the "front" face is 2 units away from the centre cube, the "top" face needs to have a crop value of -2 (on the edge which touches the front - probably the bottom edge, if you rotated it "forward" with the joystick). Similarly, the top face must be moved forward in Z-Source space - that is, away from the central cube - by the distance from the centre of the front face to the top edge. So if the front was 16 units high (because you've applied some top and bottom crop), this distance is 8 units. That makes the Z-distance value for the top to be 8 units.

Slabs and cubes are best operated in "Easy Cube" mode, so each face will "jump" to the opposite side as you rotate the whole unit.



 
© Copyright 2005 Brad Fisher. No responsibility accepted if you suffer any loss whatsoever from following these suggestions. All Rights etc Reserved.