Technical Slop

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Displace
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Circle Grads
Gradients
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Math 1
Math 2
Heat Waves
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Picking Colours
13 Revisited
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The Cubes

You've seen what some gradients do horizontally and vertically; you know that channel one is horizontal and that channel two is vertical. You have all you need to figure out what's about to follow.

For a lot of parlour tricks, I start out with one of 3 basic cubes. These serve as a base or starting point for a lot of the stuff that I do with Displace. I keep them tucked away on my harddrive and open them for when I'm in the mood to explore some basic ideas. They serve me well.

I highly recommend that you make your own and fiddle with them.

Zoom Cube

This first one is what I call the Zoom Cube. I'm very affectionate with the Zoom Cube.

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I call it the Zoom Cube because it expands, or "zooms", with two positive percentages. A lot of fun Squish Factor thing can be done with this cube. Later on, I'll be using this one for some "advanced" techniques.

 

Skew Cube

This one I call Skew Cube. Actually, this is only one of several Skew Cubes. This one does come in several flavors, but I generally use this particular one.

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When you get to playing with this one, inverting the various channels and mixing up the positive/negative values, some interesting things happen. Notice the final example of 50/-50 in particular.

 

Rotate Cube

This is another one of my favorite cubes. While it's not a true rotation of the target, it does rotate to an extent.

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Along with the Zoom Cube, I'll be using this one for some "advanced" techniques.

Notice the final example of 50/-50. Neat, eh? Do you have what it takes to figure out what is going on? I hope so.

 

As an end to all of this, I really do hope you play with various gradients in the two different channels. I also hope you play with positive/negative values. While I don't expect you to totally predict the results, I do expect you have a sneaky suspicion. You might even want to take notes. Seriously. Remember: there are different kinds of gradients other and Linear and you can put the Gradient tool in different kinds of modes.

It's times like this when it really counts -

play.fiddle.learn

*Note: While the above cubes are good and all, my examples aren't exactly right. Read about my Vicious Lie!

 

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