Loewald New Media
Graphics Utilities
Particle Accelerator
Executive Summary: create image grids from movies -- suitable for making animated particles from videos of explosions or whatever.
You basically pick the grid width and height and the rendering scale and then click a button to create the grid and another button to save it out. That's it.
New Features in v0.3
- Fix: Fixed two "nil object exceptions" which occur if you cancel out of file requesters
- New: Better Icon
New Features in v0.2
- New: Full drag and drop support
- New: If you drag a suitable file to the app (e.g. in the dock) it will behave appropriately
- New: Support for multiple "document" windows
- New: In- and Out- point support (note that it will cheerfully sample your animation backwards if you tell it to)
- New: Improved progress feedback (shows which frame is being rendered)
- New: Context Menu for output image
- New: Snazzy new About Box
- New: Windows Support
Download Particle Accelerator (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Download Particle Accelerator (Windows 2000/XP/Vista Executable)
Sample Animation (MP4)
Waterboy
Executive Summary: it's a simple program for watermarking images.
Someone asked about watermarking software on a forum I frequent, and so I wrote this little app. Free for personal use (i.e. use by persons).
Waterboy has a dazzling array of features... well it kind of has one feature. It lets you watermark with text or a PNG image (presumably with an alpha channel), and you can pick where you want your watermark to appear. You can export as JPEG and set compression levels. That's it.
History
1.3: The cursor changes when pointing to the watermark (as if to indicate you can drag it around, which you can)
1.2: You can now reposition the watermark with your mouse (the offset is from the pinned position you choose)
1.1: Added support for exporting various file formats: PNG, PSD, TGA, BMP, etc.
Download Waterboy 1.3 (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Skybox Utility
Skybox Utility is a simple application for converting a short movie (comprising six images) into individual images for use as a skybox. Its default settings assume that you:
- Have an animated camera which rotates 90 degrees clockwise (viewed from above) each frame for four frames, then points up, then down ... i.e. N E S W UP DOWN.
- Want to export the resulting images for use in Unity.
Download Skybox Utility (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Download Blue Dawn (example Bryce 6.x document)
Skybox Utility 0.4, June 23 2008
Mostly cosmetic improvements.
- New: drag and drop support for incoming movies
- New: better progress feedback
- New: spiffy new dialog box
New Features in v0.3
I fixed some minor bugs (most notably I misnamed two images on save) and added some CoreImage goodness.
- Fix: images now named correctly on export
- New: preview tiling (useful for detecting render errors)
- New: gaussian blur the faces (without messing up tiling!)
- New: apply "bloom" effect to the faces
- New: Adjust saturation (desaturate for metal reflection maps)
- New: Flip entire skybox for convenient reflection map generation
Alphaville
Alphaville is a simple application for creating images with arbitrary alpha channels (why would you want to do this? Well it's useful for Unity development, and I can think of some other reasons).
Alphaville (despite its simplicity) has a slicker UI than the other utilities (it supports drag and drop). I plan to go back and update the others some time.
If you don't know what this all means, chances are you do not need this program.
New Features in v0.3
- New: Windows version
- New: Spiffy About Box
New Features in v0.2
- New: Alpha channels are now converted to monochrome on load
- New: You can now invert alpha channels
- Fix: Alpha widget now behaves properly when clicked
Download Alphaville (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Download Alphaville (Windows 2000/XP/Vista Executable)
The icon is based on posters for Jean-Luc Godard's cult film Alphaville which is a strange film indeed. The main character, Lemmie Caution, played by Eddie Constantine (that's his image, used without permission :-o ), is some kind of detective and the movie has nothing to do with computer graphics at all. It does, however, appear to have been a major influence on the role-playing game Paranoia.