![[Loewald New Media]](/images/loewald_header.gif)
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. More recent versions include support for setting in- and out- points and crossfading the animation to make it loop. That's all there is to it.
This test animation obviously does not loop.
This is the same file processed using linear crossfading.
Download Particle Accelerator (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Download Particle Accelerator (Windows 2000/XP/Vista Executable)
Sample Animation (MP4)
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.
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 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:
Download Skybox Utility (Mac OS X Universal Binary)
Download Blue Dawn (example Bryce 6.x document)
Added Save Cross... option to save out the "tiles" image (which is useful if you want to use the skybox as a rendering backdrop in some 3d packages, such as Cheetah 3d.
Added sample offset slider. This allows you to fine-tune the sample points that the utility uses to extra faces (don't touch it unless your faces don't extract correctly).
Mostly cosmetic improvements.
I fixed some minor bugs (most notably I misnamed two images on save) and added some CoreImage goodness.
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.
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.