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I was fascinated by this image that Posyomismo posted yesterday. I haven't done any stories yet where someone got put into, shall we say, a two-dimensional format, but there's a lot of stories yet to be written and one never knows. I don't know what tools Posyomismo uses, but I suspect that they did have to make a custom physical object for the cardboard and the crosspieces. I draw the line at doing anything that requires me to go into a CAD program (or equivalent) to make new objects ... my brain does not have the space at this time to learn yet another piece of software. So I wanted to see if it could be done reasonably well entirely with effects in Daz Studio.

Posyomismo's is better--as they note, the cardboard should have thickness, and mine does not--but it's a pretty good working approximation. I could use this in a story and be satisfied with it, especially if I had time to tweak it a little more. This is a rough test.

The way this is done is first you do a normal render of the figure who's going to be on the cardboard. Ideally no ground (so no shadows) and no alpha--no background at all. You'll want to fill that background with a flat color later in your separate image-editing program, though. You also, in your image-editing program, draw a line around the figure for the shape of the cardboard cutout, and save a separate jpg where the shape of the cardboard cutout is filled white and the rest of the image is black. That's your opacity map.

Now, take a plane primitive--or a section of wall, makes no difference--surface that--apply the opacity map to it. Put a decal node on it. The image used for the decal is your render, and the opacity map for the decal should also use the opacity map you made. Now tweak scale and alignment of the decal node until it fits correctly onto the cutout plane surface. In this case I left a border on purpose, but you could get it exact. You could also probably pick a surface that's allowed to have a thickness, and get around the zero-thickness problem seen here. I'll experiment with that some other day.

The crosspieces are plane primitives that have been scaled to the right shape and positioned in place (badly; they're not quite at right angles to the main standup and the whole thing is not quite dropped to the floor. As I say, I was in a hurry).

The Blake figure is in the room so I had something to set the overall scale of the standup by (I wanted the image on the cutout to be life-size, naturally), and also so there'd be someone to gloat.

Description

I was fascinated by this image that Posyomismo posted yesterday. I haven't done any stories yet where someone got put into, shall we say, a two-dimensional format, but there's a lot of stories yet to be written and one never knows. I don't know what tools Posyomismo uses, but I suspect that they did have to make a custom physical object for the cardboard and the crosspieces. I draw the line at doing anything that requires me to go into a CAD program (or equivalent) to make new objects ... my brain does not have the space at this time to learn yet another piece of software. So I wanted to see if it could be done reasonably well entirely with effects in Daz Studio.

Posyomismo's is better--as they note, the cardboard should have thickness, and mine does not--but it's a pretty good working approximation. I could use this in a story and be satisfied with it, especially if I had time to tweak it a little more. This is a rough test.

The way this is done is first you do a normal render of the figure who's going to be on the cardboard. Ideally no ground (so no shadows) and no alpha--no background at all. You'll want to fill that background with a flat color later in your separate image-editing program, though. You also, in your image-editing program, draw a line around the figure for the shape of the cardboard cutout, and save a separate jpg where the shape of the cardboard cutout is filled white and the rest of the image is black. That's your opacity map.

Now, take a plane primitive--or a section of wall, makes no difference--surface that--apply the opacity map to it. Put a decal node on it. The image used for the decal is your render, and the opacity map for the decal should also use the opacity map you made. Now tweak scale and alignment of the decal node until it fits correctly onto the cutout plane surface. In this case I left a border on purpose, but you could get it exact. You could also probably pick a surface that's allowed to have a thickness, and get around the zero-thickness problem seen here. I'll experiment with that some other day.

The crosspieces are plane primitives that have been scaled to the right shape and positioned in place (badly; they're not quite at right angles to the main standup and the whole thing is not quite dropped to the floor. As I say, I was in a hurry).

The Blake figure is in the room so I had something to set the overall scale of the standup by (I wanted the image on the cutout to be life-size, naturally), and also so there'd be someone to gloat.