Step
3: Creating the World
As
Mike said in his post, what he did next was create a Sphere in Graffiti to
use as a placeholder, to represent a globe.
It's very easy to do: first, click on the container track again to highlight it, then hit Command K on a Macintosh, Control K on Windows, to create a new track. (Graffiti, like all Boris products, supports unlimited tracks.)
The new track shows up in the container, so now it's just a matter of setting the Shape menu to Sphere, and the Media to a nice blue color, or something similar, to act as a placeholder. Close the Text window when it opens and set the shape menu to shpere. Click the disclosure triangle for the new track to reveal its face track. Set the track media for the face track to color. In the Controls window, you can set the color to blue.
You'll notice that this blue sphere doesn't look all that spherical. It really is, but the lighting is very flat, and, frankly, pretty pedestrian. Click the Sphere track in the timeline to select it.
One
key to good lighting is to play with shadows, since they're what adds depth.
Fortunately, Graffiti has some very nice lighting controls, found, naturally
enough, in the Light tab of the Controls window.
Rather than offer a full-blown tutorial on lights (coming soon, though), you can just take a look at my final settings here, as well as the results, which I think you'll agree are much more satisfying.
The short version of what I did was lower the ambient light, increase the brightness of the light (Specular), bring it in closer (Distance), increase the spread of the light (Diffuse), and orient it in the upper left corner of the globe.
You can play around with the sliders and see what happens, which I highly encourage. Lights in Boris are a blast.
Note that I set the interpolation for all these lights as Constant. In fact you can keyframe any kind of changes in the light panel, to animate any of these parameters over time: the position of the light, its intensity, color, and so on.
You
may recall that I have an actual globe image in the images that began this
tutorial. It's just a picture of a map, which I then applied to a Sphere
back in Graffiti.
To get it, I ripped the PICT resource out of the Map control Panel using ResEdit, then remembered that it's in the Scrapbook. Oops. (PC users - that's Mac talk, ignore it.) Just grabbing it from the Scrapbook is the easy way, of course, but heaven forbid I start with the easy way.
Anyhow, I then blew it up in Photoshop and put a Gaussian blur on it, but you can save ALL those steps by downloading the file here. Even though I've reduced the view, it's the same full-sized image I used, so just download it to your hard drive if you want to.
Then
all I did was use the Media pop-up file to change Color to Still Image,
selected the map picture, and I was good to go, complete with the lighting
effects I already created for the solid color sphere. It's a hair smaller
than the original sphere, since the image I used is smaller than a full
frame of video, but it's an easy enough thing to select that track and
scale it back up, which I did, to around 130%. The result is below.
A final observation about the globe is that the 18 degree tumble that we applied to the Container looks pretty good on the globe, too, doesn't it? If you think it needs adjustment, though, just select the globe track and adjust it. To be more accurate, we should probably rotate the globe by about 25 degrees and hold it there...or not.
I'm sure one of you whizzes will write in and tell me what the real tilt of the earth's axis is, but hey, it's your world. Tilt it however you want.
Keyframe one spin on the sphere track (select the first keyframe, type "1" in the Spin box), and we're done creating the world. I told you Graffiti was more than a CG.
