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The new Spheroid Designer in KPT 3
does some very cool balls and dents and things. But
if you want to use Spheroid Designer to do ellipses,
you're restricted to ellipses that are horizontally
or vertically aligned:
 So the question is, how to you make a non-aligned ellipse? The answer was inspired by one of Kai Krause's tips: a reversible domain shift. In practical terms, "reversible domain shift" just means distorting the image in an undoable fashion, so you apply an effect on the distorted image, then undistort to recover the original picture. Method 1 First, you rotate your image by a set amount, say twenty degrees:  Apply your spheroid:  Then rotate back:  This works, but because of the two rotations used, it blurs the image slightly, and you'll need to crop around the image to remove the frame that two rotations will add. Use the sharpen filter to fix the blurring, but this can produce other unwanted side effects. Method 2 For this method, you will need Photoshop; you can't do it with Picture Publisher.
First, shear your image. Use Filter > Distort
> Shear..., set "Undefined Areas" to "Wrap Around",
and move the two endpoints of the shear line to the left
and right an equal amount:
 Click "OK", then apply your spheroid:  Flip your image horizontally, apply the Shear filter with the same settings as before, then flip the image back:  You will note the left and right edges do not line up exactly right. I'm not sure why this is so, but you may want to clip those lines out. This method, though, doesn't result in the same blurring as the rotation method. It also lends itself to some rather more interesting ellipsoid shapes, if you do something a little more bizarre than a straight linear shear:  And of course, this is only your basic spheroid, and it's only been sheared on one axis. Lots of fun can be had with this! |
