The name of the money game seems to be to develop a creative piece of software, or maybe a whole software collection, and to seduce a big conglomerate to taste your wares. The conglomerate pays some big bucks for your enterprise, and places their name on your packaging. You, as the CEO, retire to some cushy pseudo-position in the new company, and your erstwhile employees are either fired (oh, excuse my French,.. I mean "downsized", or if you prefer, "sold out") or subsumed like fodder in a new mega-organization. Sound familiar? It should, since it has become the way corporate America is dancing these days. hey. What's the big deal? If the stockholders are happy, we're happy,.. er... right?

Remember ASDG? You will if you're an older Amigoid. ASDG produced a program called whatchamacallit that was ImageFX main competition way back when (oh, right... there was also ImageMaster too). Well, Perry K., the king of ASDG, wandered far afield from the Amiga to pastures overgrown with green, and ASDG was sold to whosamathemoid. Perry K. took up a position in a golden tower at whosamathemoid, and was never heard from again as a creative force. The software was mulched under by the new company, and taken off the market. In the fifties, we used to sit around wishing for flying saucers ("oh please, let them come to take me away"). In the nineties, we wait around for AT&T or some other bloated giant ("oh please, let them come to take me away").

The latest merger news is Fractal Design being bought out (or into) by MetaTools. Fractal Design makes the 3D software RayDream Designer, Fractal Painter, Expression, Poser (!!!), and the 3D paint software called Detailer. MetaTools is best known for KPT Bryce, Kai's PowerTools, VectorFX, PowerGoo, and a bunch of other stuff. This new corporation is going to dominate many areas of the graphics and animation market for some time to come. Up until now, RayDream hasn't been a threat to LightWave as far as broadcast output is concerned, but if I were NewTek I would be looking over my shoulder. In the past, we have had three tiers of 3D software: Lowend, Middlend, and Expensivend. LightWave does high end stuff, but was considered Middlend for a long time by the arrogant Expensivenders, while RayDream was considered somewhat Lowend. No no no. Times have-are changed/ing. The new corporation (which may be called MetaDesign) is going to pump up RayDream in a major way, while keeping its price as low as possible. This is going to threaten NewTek in its most vulnerable underbelly, in the Windows and Mac marketplace. RayDream Studio, with all sorts of enhancements and fancy features, goes to version 5 in the Spring. What is NewTek planning for LightWave 6 to counter this and other moves by its competitors? Only the shadow knows.

Cinematte is the new Chromakey compositing software from Nova Design (the ImageFX people, who are also known as Digital Dominion). It runs on Windows systems as a Photoshop plugin, and since many of you LightWavers speak Windows and puddle around in Photoshop, you should take a look at it. here's a brief overview...

Cinematte addresses both Blue or Green color channel keying effects, for blended composites. It interpolates an Alpha Channel in the mix so that soft areas of the image blend effortlessly into whatever background they are placed against (hmmm... I could place my grandmother against a Bronx backdrop, perhaps showing her standing on a corner dressed as RoboCop... hmmmmm...). You have to make sure that the targeted dropout color, Blue or Green, stays out of the main image of course, or else the image will look like Swiss cheese and bleed through. But not to worry, Cinematte can help you change blues or greens in the image area into another non-bleedthrough color.

Screen Color: This toggle allows you to select between a blue screen or a green screen. Green screens are the rage, because they show up fleshtones better than blue. The selected color will be the dropout in the composite.

Output: This is a list that allows you to select what Cinematte will output in the final transformation, and you can choose from among the following options:

1. Foreground and Transparency: Outputs the foreground graphic with modifications and places a matte in the transparency (or alpha) channel. The transparency channel is what allows Photoshop Layers to let the background image show through.

2. Foreground: Outputs the modified foreground but does not output a transparency (Alpha) channel.

3. Matte Only: Replaces the foreground image with the matte and does not output a transparency.

4. Matte and Transparency: Replaces the foreground image with the matte and places the matte in the transparency as well.

5. Transparency Only: Does not modify the current layer, foreground, in any way and outputs a matte in the transparency channel only.

6. Background from Clipboard: Allows Photoshop Compatible applications that can run plugins to use Cinematte. Since many of these programs may not have a Layers system identical to Photoshop's, Cinematte can use this output option to get a background image from the clipboard and composite it within Cinematte automatically. This option is only available if you have image data currently on the clipboard.

Dynamic Range: You can take a badly illuminated Blue or Green screen shot or sequence of frames and tweak the greyscale values in the matte in order to pull the lightest gray towards white and the darkest gray towards black. All values in between the new white and black are stretched to provide a wider spread of grays, improving the blending of composited image edges.

Correction (also known as Screen Correction): Finds the color furthest from Blue or Green in the region selected by the eyedropper gadget and calculating a red, green and blue correction value, apply it when creating the matte to make the Blue or Green screen as pure as possible. Unlike the Dynamic Range setting, this function can force the background of the matte to a much purer black without the loss of finer details. The eyedropper works by switching to a display in the thumbnail preview of the original Blue or Green screened image. You then click and drag to draw a box around a region containing the worst example of illumination on the Blue or Green screen.

Force Black: Forces more of the darker grays to be pure black, (the higher the value here, the more of the dark grays affected) which makes them totally transparent allowing the background to come through at full intensity. Force White: This is the opposite of the Force Black function, and forces more of the lighter grays to become pure white, making them completely opaque so that none of the background comes through. The eyedroppers used by Force Black and Force White allow you to sample the preview image for the most contaminated Black or White areas of the image. After clicking the eyedropper tool you then click and drag in the thumbnail preview to draw a box to outline a region to sample for selecting the most contaminated black or white area on the image. If you don't already have "Show Matte" selected, you will temporarily be presented with a display of the matte to select from.

Gamma: This allows you to adjust the overall contrast and brightness of the matte. Increasing this value will darken the background and brighten the foreground while maintaining the mid-tone grays that can be washed out by overuse of Force Black and Force White.

Matte Blur: This applies a Gaussian blur to the matte in the specified radius, allowing you to soften the edges. This can help when using images acquired from video that have bad artifacting or dot crawl. The drawback is that you will lose some definition on the edges as a result. If you're creating the frames for multi-media or game output, you can restore some definition by scaling the size of the image down.

Matte Choking: This command is used for pulling the matte in or pushing it out. If your matte, because of a badly lit background or excessive blue spill on the edges of the foreground object, has blue outlines, then using Matte Choking with a negative value of one (-1) will pull the matte in slightly. The soft edges are maintained. Positive values for choking can be used for exploring interesting effects.

Protection: This is a powerful feature that can actually prevent blue from being removed from the foreground subjects. A common problem with Blue screening is that when the Blue or Green is removed, any component of blue that is in the foreground subject is removed. This can make a black tuxedo "flatten" out and become somewhat gray-ish black, forcing the loss of color depth. This is even more of a problem when using Green screens as green is found in flesh tones and in many other colors. Protection is a scaled value, basing how much blue to retain on the value entered and how opaque the foreground area is. Usually Protection only needs to be set to 1 (one) to work properly. Higher values can cause blue to be retained in the edges as well.

Light Color: This substitutes a new color, specified as an RGB value, for any blue spill on the foreground subject. By using this parameter you can alter the spill lighting as a post-process on the foreground subject so that they match the background more precisely. This can also be used to alter the color of the blue or green screen background to another color for special effects.

Screen Removal: This control value specifies a threshold of blue that is to be removed from the foreground image. If left at a default of zero, no blue is removed. As you raise this value, more and more blue is removed.

OK/Cancel: OK tells the Cinematte plugin that you're finished setting up the parameters and you're ready for it to apply them to the current image/layer, while Cancel will exit from Cinematte without applying any process to it whatsoever.

Load/Save: These options are used for using and storing sets of parameters. If you find a set of parameters that fit your work habits, or if you're going to process a series of images from an identical shoot through Cinematte, you can save your ideal set of parameters here so whenever you need to leave Photoshop and re-enter it later you can load up that same set of parameters and go right back to work.

Help brings up the full featured Cinematte help system.

Show Matte: This causes the Preview thumbnail to show the matte transparency being created rather than the foreground image that is being keyed.

Preview Thumbnail: The Thumbnail image is used to show you not only what Cinematte will do with your image prior to actually applying the effect of the plugin to your image/layer, it also will display a representation of the transparency matte it creates so you can use the Force Black and Force White eyedropper tools are used to outline representational regions of noise in the black and white sections of the transparency matte and can correct for them. The Correction tool also uses the Preview Thumbnail for sampling Blue or Green from for determining correction values.

The plus and minus sign gadgets beneath the image are zooming controls that let you zoom in and out of the image to see finer details.

The numeric display between the magnification controls show you the current magnification level. A display, for example, of 1:8 means that for every one pixel in the preview thumbnail there are eight pixels in the actual image.

Nova is at work translating Cinematte as a plug-in for Adobe Premier, Insync, Speed Razor, LightWave 3D, 3D Studio Max, and more. The documentation lists vendors for purchasing Chromakey paints and background fabrics, in case you don't have the correct material on hand. If your work demands high end compositing operations, be sure to check out this software. Contact...

Nova Design, Inc.
1910 Byrd Avenue
Richmond, VA 23230
804-282-6528
http://users.aol.com/DgDominion
DgDominion@aol.com

Need to get your rocks off in LightWave, perhaps incorporating unique designed landscapes that go from your fevered mind straight to an animation? Well, me digital bucko, time to investigate "Relief" from International Software Engineering (call 906-475-0085, or fax them at 906-475-9576). This program is a gem at what it does, and what it does is to add a marvelous little landscape utility to LightWave.

System Requirements: PC running Windows 95/NT with 8/16 megs of RAM, SVGA at 800x600 (or higher), 66 Mhz 486 (or better), and 2 megs of drive space. Or: DEC Alpha with NT 3.1+ and 16 megs of RAM, pointer device (mouse will do), and the same a s Windows 95/NT on a PC as far as SVGA and drive space.

Relief can provide landscapes as Grayscales to LightWave objects, DEMs to LightWave, DEMs to BMPs, and a Random Landscape generator (RLG). You can customize the parameters, including resolution, exaggeration levels, or might choose to keep the DEM input data as it is for a more realistic landscape. By creating associated BMP files, you will be able to use them as texture maps on the landscape models. You could also use the BMPs as deformation maps on a planar object, and achieve comparative results. Any image (logo, portrait,.. anything) that you have stored as a grayscale BMP can be used to generate a 3D "landscape" that can be animated in LightWave, giving new life to old images. Separate modules allow for the creation of Mountains, Volcanoes, and even cratered landscapes.

The Relief interface is embedded in (and can be toggled on in) LightWave Modeler, under the Objects>Custom menu. Once activated, it allows you to select the type of terrain you want to produce and set the parameters. Then your machine whirrs away while the data is processed. The Scene, Object, and Image files are written to their proper folders.

Like Granny intoned while belching out a response to imported German lager and reading Sartre, "screw it!". Obviously, none of youse is interested in the animation offer I've been touting in the last two columns, so it is as of now canceled. Too bad. Some nice stuff you would have enjoyed. But I'm not into suffering or giving the store away,.. and prostelization sucks (I think Granny said that too, while riding naked through the streets and alleys of Chicago on a mule).

I bought a Primera Pro printer (wax and dye sublimation at 300 DPI) a few months ago. It was used about a dozen times, and then I found an ink jet that served my purposes better. I want to sell the Primera Pro. It retails for about $1500.00 at this point, and I have about $400.00 worth of supplies for it. It does nice printouts (in Vermont, we say "noyse"), and is Windows and Amiga compatible. Anybody interested? $1000.00 or best offer. Think about it.

I have a bucket of other interesting stuff to share with y'all, but the hell with it, I'm tired. Besides, there's more words here than the last two times, so get a life, and I'll lubricate your obsessed minds in the near future.