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TUTORIAL • MARCH 27 , 2001
Mask Function in Amorphium Pro
Using masking to paint, create effects and increase polygons

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
[email protected]

Last week I reviewed Amorphium Pro 1.1 from Electric Image. Amorphium Pro is a 3D modeling and animation package targeted toward designers, with a particular bent toward Flash designers. Its features have been implemented in a way that 2D artists can understand very easily, and these features are quite robust. So I thought we'd take a more in depth look at one of these today—namely masking—and see how it fits into the overall workflow of Amorphium Pro.

If you haven't already, you ought to download the demo from http://www.amorphium.com. (It's available for Mac and Windows.) For this tutorial, we're going to be working with 3D text to create a dripping effect.

To get started, we're just going to launch Amorphium and delete the default sphere that appears. Select the text tool from the Mesh palette, and click in the center of your composition window. A dialog box will appear asking you to fill out the information about your text.

I'm going to alter my depth to 15 and my text to read "Tex." I'll use Arial Black (which all of you should have), but this can be done with any font that Amorphium can deal with. (Some fonts don't work right in Amorphium.) I'm also going to change my face, bevel and side colors to something more neutral.

Now we're going to go straight into masking. Click the Mask button in your menu bar. By default, the mask paintbrush will be selected. Go ahead and use this tool. We're just going to mask off the upper half of the text so that when we do our dripping, we don't have to worry about affecting the parts of the text that will remain the same.


Masked areas are red.

But before we begin melting our image, we're going to increase the polygons in the area we'll be working on. Why? Well, we want our drips to look like drips, not like dangling triangles. Increasing the polygon count in the unmasked areas will provide us, simply, with more geometry to work with.

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