Back to Learning Center Home
Ulead COOL 3D Tutorials
Tutorial Index | Page 1 2
Beyond the Presets
-by Tony Celeste
Light and Color

This set of options is very powerful in terms of creating 3D effects, since properly applied lighting is essential to making an image on your 1 Dimensional monitor screen appear to be 3 Dimensional to your viewers. Here's a look at the Attribute Toolbar:


There are a total of 4 lighting types available in the "adjust" drop down list: Surface, Specular, Light, and Ambient. I always start out by adjust the Surface lighting, since this affects the actual surface color of the image.

The next option I adjust is the Ambient light. "Ambient" is another way of saying atmospheric light. Instead of referring to a specific light source, this is essentially the general amount of light that reflects off of your image from all surrounding light sources. As such, the Ambient control can be used to adjust the overall look and feel of your image, particularly if it appears too dark or too light. I always adjust ambient lighting in "grayscale" terms (in other words, I only use white, gray, or black). I've found that using other colors can be unpredictable

table, particularly once Ambient lighting is combined with other sources of image lighting.

Once I have my Surface color and Ambient lighting selected, I set my Light options The attribute toolbar changes when the Light setting is selected to allow for exact color and placement of up to 4 separate lights:

Turning on these lights is one of the most important factors in giving your image its 3 dimensional appearance. The following table shows the same image with Surface color and Ambient lighting only, then with light number one turned on (and shining from the upper left), then with light number one turned off and light number two turned on (and shining from the lower left), and finally with lights number one and number two both turned on:

Ambient Lighting Only
Light Number 1
Light Number 2
Lights Number 1 and 2


You may notice when looking at the actual colors of the lights that they aren't what you expected. For example, you may be looking at what you thought would be a bright red light, and find out that it's actually a white light. The bright red appearance may be coming from it's reflection off of a red image. It's important to keep in mind that the light created by shining Lights on the image will always be a combination of the shining Light and the image's Surface color. For this reason, the Lights that you shine on your image may require some careful fine tuning to get the exact effect you're looking for.

The last Light setting that I adjust is Specular. This setting accounts for reflectivity off of the surface of your image. I generally choose white or a shade of gray to give the image a shiny surface, or dark gray or black to give the image a dull or rough surface. Occasionally bright yellow also makes a good Specular color. After selecting a Specular color, you can fine tune the color with the "shininess" slider on the Attribute Toolbar.

Bevel

Applying a Bevel to your image creates a raised surface and gives the image additional depth. When deciding on a bevel, I usually start out with a preset and then do a lot of fine tuning using the Bevel Attribute Toolbar:

The controls work as described below:

Bevel Mode: This affects the smoothness of the bevel and can also be used to affect the edge where the surface of the text meets the sides of the text, and to create special effects. There are 4 basic modes, they work as follows:

None: A flat surface with no bevel.
Flat: Similar to chiseled but rises to a flat surface instead of to a point.
Round: A smooth rounded surface, similar to 3D Round text in PhotoImpact.
Chiseled: The surface rises to a sharp point, similar to 3D Chisel in PhotoImpact.

There are 4 edge modes that affect the image surface plus the edge where the surface of the text meets the sides of the text:

Round-Chiseled: Rounded surface to chiseled edge.
Chiseled-Round: Chiseled surface to rounded edge.
Round-Round: Rounded surface to rounded edge.
Chiseled-Chiseled: Chiseled surface to chiseled edge.

In addition, there a 6 special effects modes: Hollow, Imprint, Frame, Board, Facet and Outline.

Each mode has a unique set of controls, but there are 5 controls that are common to almost all bevels:

Extrusion: Elongates the sides of the bevel.
Weight: Adjusts how far the sides of each letter extend outward toward neighboring letters.
Border: Affects how far the bevel extends from the surface of the text.
Depth: Adjusts the intensity of the bevel on the surface of the text and sides of the text.
Precision: Adjusts the smoothness Vs sharpness of the bevel's surface.

The following examples show the same image with each of the settings changed to show their effect. The base settings for the image are:


Base Image
Extrusion = 600
Weight = 50
Border = 10
Depth = 80
Precision = 1


Gallery

The Gallery Section does not have an adjustable attribute toolbar. In the Gallery Section, each preset actually contains Texture, Light & Color, and Bevel attributes, so the Gallery attributes are adjusted in the Texture, Light & Color, and Bevel sections.

Motion

The Motion section contains presets for creating basic animations. Instead of using the attribute toolbar, animation is controlled using the animation toolbar:

For the most part, animation in the motion section is controlled using the Scale, Position, and Orientation settings in the animation toolbar. However, other attributes, including Color, Texture, Lights, Bevel, and Camera, can also be animated in Cool 3D. I'll take a closer look at Cool 3D Animation next month in Part II of this article.

Templates

The templates section is divided into two subsections: Objects and Composition. The objects section contains an assortment of clip art type objects that can be dragged and dropped onto your image. The Composition section contains complex animations of text and objects. At first glance, the composition section may look like it cannot be customized. However, you can drag and drop any of the composition presets onto your own image, and then completely customize it by making changes to the objects and / or text.

Camera

The Camera section contains a variety of presets for altering camera angle and distance. There are slider controls provided on the attribute toolbar for fine tuning both settings:


Background

The question of how to change the background in Cool 3D seems to pop up from time to time in the Ulead Newsgroup and in the I-US forum. Fortunately, it's eNews Group. Click on Background and the Attribute Toolbar adjusts to display Background settings:

Click on the color button or adjust the Brightness and/or Saturation and/or Hue settings to change the solid Background color. Click on the open button to import a Background from your hard drive or a disk. Click on the paste button to import an image from the clipboard. Once an image is imported, the re-size button (located next to the paste button) becomes available so that the background can be adjusted to fit your image.

In next month's article, I'll take an in-depth look at making your Cool 3D images come alive with basic and special effects animation. Cool 3D contains many exciting animation controls, and thanks to the use of the same type of Key Frame animation used in professional video production, the controls can create powerful animations in record time.

Tutorial Index | Page 1 2