With a little help from my new glow generator program, the Jedi Council has
rightfully decided to elevate me to the status of Jedi Master. In this scene,
I'm frying some battle droid butt aboard the Trade Federation battleship.
This web page is dedicated to a new 2D image processing program that I just finished writing. This C based program was written from October 6-20, 2002 and it took me about 30 hours to create. I've also just added (1/1/05) a feature to the program that allows the intensity of the glow effect to darken the background image before the compositing process. This feature allows the program to work more like how Photoshop does the compositing, if I want it to. The purpose of this feature is to allow the glow effects to have more of a "bite" in the resulting effect, instead of just simply tinting the effect.
This program allows me to generate extremely realistic and dynamic glows for a variety of effects including Star Wars lightsabers, laser blasts, energy bindings, Force based projection lightning as well as Star Trek: TOS phaser beams. After the effects are created, the program can automatically composite these effects with the background plate as well as incorporate holdout mattes to block the effect from selected parts of the frame. The program can also output the effect at various stages of completion in the form of RAW files. I've also just completed my first 30 frame animation clip that uses the glow program.
Although I already have a photographic method for generating these types of effects, it is very tedious to create even a single frame of animation using this now obsolete method. And some types of effects such as lightning can't even be created at all. My new CG method allows me to create these same looking effects hundreds of times faster, and for the first time, I can create glow based animations at any resolution I want.
For those of you interested in where you can get commercially available software to perform these types of effects, you can visit the AlamDV website: http://fxhome.com . The various SFX software packages sold at this website run about $90.00 dollars and are very flexible and supports a wide selection of "glow" type effects. The website also sells bluescreen/greenscreen compositing software as well. AlamDV doesn't seem to be able to generate effects above TV's 640x480 pixel resolution though? My glow program can render effects up to motion picture resolution (4000x1702 pixels).
