just an asterisk

I write this somewhat tongue-in-cheek as I’d never actually recommend doing graphics, let alone complex graphics in Microsoft Word. In fact I’d probably never write an article recommending doing word-processing in Microsoft Word. Yet I found myself in a position recently where I did just that (the former) quite by accident.

Let me preface this by saying I have more than a little experience in high-end composting/special-effects, having worked with broadcast quality composting and 3D systems such as Inferno/Flame and Softimage/Alias (when those software packages cost as much to purchase as a mortgage on a studio apartment and the computers needed to run them were bigger then my refrigerator and no, I’m not talking the 60s but the mid-90s which just show how fast things evolve).

This all came about for a very pedestrian goal; I wanted to see if my idea for putting a moveable couch-back meant for a sectional couch sold by West Elm:

would work instead on the floor in my corner window area that was currently being ‘wasted’ as I didn’t want to block the floor-to-ceiling view with chairs:

I didn’t have Photoshop handy and knew that the Paint ‘Accessory’ that comes with Window is less then useful so on a whim I imported the background picture into Word.

I had a very rough vision of how the corner pillow could work, the question was would it work in reality? I really didn’t want to buy/ship the pillow only to find out my minds-eye was near-sighted.

My first thought was a rug would be pretty critical to sit on while leaning against the couch-back.

I did find a couple of rugs that would work for the area but had no way to compare how they’d look in the room (or so I thought). I did screen shots of a few but it was pretty clear I could not tell much

so I used the most basic tool, Crop to get a better idea ‘near’ my room pic

So now I could get a very basic idea about how any rug would match with the area.

This was really all I was expecting to do at this point but I decided (as per my usual MO) to poke around and see if I could do anything else. Lo and behold there are some Picture Filters, one of which is a perspective tool with some pre-sets.

I applied it to my first carpet;

Ok that doesn’t look right at all, maybe I can tweak the settings? You bet I can!

Using the above adjustments and a patient eye I was able to achieve the following;

I was more than a little impressed since I find spell-checking to be a nightmare in Word and here I was with a two-layer composite utilizing crop, scale and perspective tools that got me a long way towards envisioning my idea. Could I make this look better? Well my first problem of course is the rug is on top of the end-table which is sort of ruining the illusion for me. Easy enough to solve using basic layer compositing techniques! I copied the background picture and put it back over the two layers shown above:

Which got me back to where I started but fear not! All I need to do is a few crops of the top room image that is right now above my ‘3d Carpet’ which is on top of my original room shot:

And voila! My rug is now behind the end-table.

Since ‘the game is now afoot’’ I decided to see if I have any other tools to help ‘sell’ this shot;

Why yes I do!

Bevel to give the rug some depth, and reflection and shadow to anchor it to the floor. Naturally each one takes some tweaking to make it look right but with a little effort:

Now I can just copy the parameters to my other ‘carpets’ (in fact if I’d saved then as pics a simple ‘Replace Pic’ would do so immediately):

So conceivably now I can import almost any rug I can find on the internet into the picture fully rendered into the scene with a few mouse-clicks.

Pretty impressive, Photorealistic Word Processing, but it hasn’t solved my original problem, how do I see what the corner pillow will look like? I can’t just paste the pillow into the scene, for one thing I’d need to crop it, for the other the lighting and perspective are all wrong and the tools I have won’t work except on a flat image w/o any perspective of it’s own. Even if I had a picture of the pillow ‘straight on’ it doesn’t’ solve the fact that it is a 3 dimensional object where each side (front, top, side) needs to fit into the picture correctly so any rotations that will work for one side will not work for the others. Pasting it in just doesn’t give me any real clues as to whether it will work or not:

Can I ‘build’ my own pillow using the same technique I used to rotate the carpet since that did work for a two-dimensional object and a top, front and side are in fact just three two-dimensional objects that are connected?

The first thing I’ll need is a swatch of the cloth which I can get from cropping the above image;

And in fact since I have a pretty low-angle view of the corner I’ll take that as well:

First we use our perspective tools to eye-ball a pillow-front:

And side:

And top:

Getting there, but one thing that stands out as we ‘build’ our pillow is that the single swatch of cloth doesn’t really fit into the room which has directional lighting, but no worries, we have some basic picture correction tools to play with to account for that:

By noticing where the light is coming from, we can modify the brightness of the top:

front;

and side;

to create some separation and depth between the three identical swatches and also ‘cement’ them into the scene by matching the lighting.  Naturally if we had made the side lighter and the top darker we could have achieved dimensionality but the resulting image would have still been incongruous to the scene and even the most unobservant or untrained eye would have found it so:

Bad Lighting

Matched Lighting

And of course we can use or old friends  ‘shadow’ and ‘reflections’ to ‘anchor’ the pillow even more into the picture:

Using these tools we can continue to build the pillow out and experiment with single-cushions, corner- cushions and cushion placement, which is the exact goal we started with:

Corner facing northeast:

Corner facing northwest:

Corner facing southwest:

Two Singles Facing each other:

Naturally none of these looks like it was done in a 3D program, then again they are perfectly serviceable to make a judgment call on this purchase, and again, this is a word-processor, the best I should have hoped for was annotations!  I have a pretty good visual approximation of how this serviceable and modular solution will look in reality.

I decided to continue playing with this concept as I wanted to put a mirror on the beam near the window to extend that sky-view

so I just played with the same tools (ok I was just having fun and seeing how far I could push it!)

First I copied a piece of the window from the background picture:

And then used my perspective and shadow tools to add a mirror to the beam and then copied layers back over it (like I did earlier to put the end table back over the carpet I’d added) and once again, voila;

A little more effort would have allowed me to build layers so that the mirror seamlessly extended up to and under the table but there was really no need for that and I resisted the urge to make it ‘perfect’.

In the end I purchased a single-corner pillow which I can then move into any corner as the mood strikes, utilizing the corner fully and comfortably without covering it with chairs that would simply get in the way. I also removed the glass table and mounted the TV on wall so that area is totally open. I’m looking forward to a cloudless night and a great bottle of red to test it out sans software.

Best of all, after I did all of this 2D composting and 3D rendering, I discovered some text-entry tools in Word as well that I could use to document my experience. Who knew?

I’m hoping readers will take the larger lesson from this post rather then assuming I am advocating using Word as a graphics compositor or interior design tool as there are 100s of dedicated solutions for both those needs.

More to the point is the spirit of adventure you can bring to your software applications that will unleash potential that perhaps the software developers didn’t intend or imagine; don’t be afraid to push buttons and explore menus; if you can use a word processor to do serviceable 3D rendering and compositing, imagine what you can push a 3D Render, Graphics Composting Tool or any other dedicated application to do by just poking under the hood and letting imagination and necessity be your guide.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Educational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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