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Alpha channel is a bit undefined

Mon, 05/14/2007 - 14:28 — Dentoid

Currently the alpha channel isn't really handled all that well. It could be good with a discussion on how to handle alpha in different cases. Possibly just have it like any other color channel? Maybe it is good already, and I just missed how it works? :)

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Mon, 05/14/2007 - 20:41 — Alex Trujillo
Alex Trujillo's picture

Alpha Masks and L-systems

We do need masks, though. A good alpha system would help with this. Masks would change this whole scene a bit, since you could apply a Rectangle mask to a Cloud render, then that rectangle could be considered the new resolution of the image, since the rest would be blank alpha.
Then, another thing that would be needed would be a way to repeat it. Maybe a simple syntax like that used by L-systems could be used for that-- implementing L-systems would be a very powerful feature in its own right.
But I don't think L-systems would work until we could figure out how to define what an 'object' inside of FxGen. You could just define an object as the output of an operator, and then use the masks to define the shape of the object, then repeat it along nodes in the L-system.
See how all that should work?

Mon, 05/14/2007 - 21:15 — Dentoid

Hmm

Took me a while at first to get what you meant, but I got it. :)
I don't think it's a good idea to try to guess "objects" from things. You could just have a "crop" operator that cuts out a rect in a bitmap, and maybe an "autocrop" that detects the rect borders. Then that could be used in the types of operators you're talking about. It's an interesting thought, having a semi-render operator that repeats a smaller input bitmap in some way to generate a bigger one. ProFX uses something similar like that _a lot_ (even their noise functions is just a repetition of blobs of different shapes, a slight bit like wavelets I guess).

Did that make sense? :)

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