Friday, March 27, 2015

Retrospecter: Understanding OSL (Oriented Source Lighting) with watermelons

It's Friday! What a good day for a good old...


Retrospecter!

Retrospecter is that section of the blog where every couple of weeks I bring you old stuff from the past. Well, I bring you a funny thing for today's Retrospecter... I was looking back into the blog's past and saw this awesome post from EXACTLY one year ago. Remember the exploding watermelons? :D Boom boom!

I found this picture on a newsletter email sent by Photobucket. I don't think they realized how useful this is for me...

It's basically a .gif of a watermelon explosion. Cool right?

Boo...ooo...ooo...ooo...oom...!

Yep, the aftermath must have been messy. Well the purpose of this post is not to share the coolness of the animation (My good old friend Captain Cid showed me that the animation comes from this video). I realized that it is very useful to use it to study the interesting light effects that are happening here.

And to do that, all I'm going to do is open the animation in GIMP (an opensource Photoshop) and save some of the frames separately. Let's pay attention to these:

The previous moment to the explosion.

In miniature painting, OSL effects (Oriented Source Lighting) are very cool and quite difficult to achieve. This exercise will help us understand them better. Taking the above photo as our "base", check out how the colours change with the light coming from the watermelon (the explosion):

The explosion starts inside the watermelon.

See how the reds start to bathe some specific parts of the table and clothes of the guy. Pay especial attention to the intensity of the red in each area! It's really interesting!

It's getting hot in here!

Interesting to see that the white of the guy becomes even more white, while the face becomes completely orange!

Man, that watermelon!

This pic is great to show how the light glows from within the watermelon, and shows from the cracks. Very bright yellows and oranges glow from within, and the watermelon is no longer green, but quite red actually (complementary of green, very discordant).

The explosion at its maximum

And the brighter it gets inside the watermelon, the more red its skin becomes, but in contrast with the light, and some areas that are brown, we can still see that its a green watermelon.

Fire in the hall!

At this point, the effect of the orange light in the guy begins to fade.

Watch out man!

The pieces of the watermelon spread away, and become more green as they escape from the light area.

Incoming watermelon!

At this point, the guy has no orange light on him.

My eye! My eye!

Man, this guy is corageous!

Well, I find this absolutely amazing. Studying this effect certainly opened my mind to a new world of possibilities. I was very surprised to see the white becoming even whiter instead of orange. Cool stuff.

I hope you enjoyed it! (and got something out of it of course)

Many watermelons died to bring us this information.

;)

Until our next Retrospecter, enjoy the weekend!

2 comments:

greggles said...

What a freaking great example of OSL!!!!!

Fencing Contractors Edison said...

Great blog, thanks for posting this