Alien Skin's Bokeh

 

Original Image (top)

Focus changed with Bokeh (bottom)

Alien Skin software has been a favorite of mine for quite some time offering professional plug-in packages for Photoshop, such as Eye Candy and Xenofex (see my past post for a review on Eye Candy 6). Once again they come up with a great little utility to help you enhance your digital images with the plug-in Bokeh. It's one of those don't always need it but when you need it, there's nothing else like it helper tools. In the past whenever I wanted to draw emphasis on the foreground subject matter I would mask off the foreground, feather the selection, invert it and add a gaussian blur. The results would work sometimes, but the control over the depth of field look was rather limited. With Bokeh, you get a great interface that comes with a long list of preset blurs to simulate the look of a Canon or Sony lens, or allow you to adjust and save your own settings for other projects. Caution must be used with Bokeh however, as one tends to be given too much control and before you know it, the foreground subject matter you selected seems to 'pop' off that page a bit too much. This plug-in is great for sports images or food product shots in a natural background setting. You can even add some vignette to the image to help give a more realistic blend to your masked selection. 

Demo copies of Bokeh can be downloaded from their website. The price for Bokeh, when weighed against trying to reshoot an image, may be worth the money to invest in this great tool for electronic photo manipulation.

Bryce-the Ultimate in Landscape Generation

Bryce 6 interface

For over a decade Bryce has provided electronic artists one of the finest landscape/terrain generation programs. The latest version (6.1) allows more flexibility in usage and some of the best quality renderings you could expect from a mid-range program. Within minutes you are able to create stunning landscapes, complete with foliage, imported 3d objects, 2d planes that support aplha channel graphics AND adjust lighting shadows from the alpha channel (a big plus)-there is just so much this package offers. You can rely on the installed textures, objects, lighting and sky settings or advance into any of these areas and give it your own settings. Web support for this program is enormous with literally thousands of sites online to help with tutorials, downloadable models, textures, etc. to give you endless possibilities for your ideas.

In the past Bryce was known pretty much for its terrain generation quality but with the added support of Daz models and animations your ability to make stunning landscapes with animated characters is so much easier.

Other features include real world lighting with IBL (image based lighting) support, MAC Intel compatible (another big plus), image based brushes for advanced terrain editing and mesh export of Boolean objects.

For those interested in test driving this program, both Bryce and Daz are available for free download with limited program capabilities (they want to entice you to buy full versions but allows you to get familiar with the interface) so visit their site and find out more about this truly remarkable program.

Blender

user interface of Blender showing

multiple views

If any one were to ask me to give a one sentence synopsis of Blender, I would have to say 'I can't believe this is a freeware program.' What a package for 3d modeling, rendering, animating, rigging and game creation. Believe it or not, this is a free program. All you need to do is devote a vast amount of time to get used to the interface (navigation was a bit tricky for me having been trained in 3D Max, but after a while it becomes easier) and location of the myriad drop-down menus. Luckily, Blender has a vast support area online and in downloadable files to train you through the basics, up to the more complex operations Blender can provide.

MODELING

Blender comes loaded with 3d mesh primitives for you to build from, polygon mesh, NURBS, bezier and b-spline curves, metaballs and font support. The process of building objects is similar to most popular/conventional packages.

RIGGING

Fast skeletal creation with interactive 3d paint for vertex weighting, fast auto skinning, bone layering for group organization. Overall I feel the rigging works as well as the high end software packages that sell for thousands of dollars.

Additional features include UV unwrapping, shader construction, particle systems and much more. One of the hardest areas I found to delve into was the 3d real-time game creation. This part of the Blender options is not for the weak at heart. The good news still boils down to the fact that you are not paying for this fantastic program so go ahead and visit their website and ive it a try.

Terragen

(A) Terragen interface

(B) sample Terragen image

Planetside software, providers of Terragen bring us a low cost (because it's no cost) landscape and natural environmental creator/renderer. In no time at all you find yourself wading through a variety of options for terrain, water, atmospherics and lighting to create stunning still images or animations. Written for use on MAC or Windows PC systems this small but professional program let's you edit all the same settings you would find in larger, more expensive packages like Bryce, but with the interface is what I would call user-advanced as opposed to user-friendly. It does have a large amount of drag onscreen component capabilities but from my experience, not as easy to navigate a Bryce. The results are something else that always leaves me shaking my head with disbelief that they offer a freeware program this goos. Terragen has been used in a variety of commercial products by letting the artist create near photo-realistic images. For those feeling adventurous, they can continue on to Terragen 2 which gives a much larger scope of options to create landscapes and animations. With a great forum and a few nice plugins to add nice effects, this program is well worth the effort to sit down and explore. You'll be amazed at how good a picture you can make in a short amount of time.