Yesterday, as i thought about observing Easter and spring, i fondly remembered doing pysansky in Philly with Marci (while Deb cross stitched). I might still have some dye packets, but contemplating the time, the mess, the sinus pressure from blowing eggs, i didn’t begin to desire to actually decorate blown eggs.
I did want to send some sort of greeting, no matter how late, to my grandparents. Lately i’ve been popping off photo postcards, using adhesive backs on prints i have made at RitzPix. The thought of an image collage in an egg shape seemed to echo the usual striped egg, and then there was the temptation to do image mapping to a 3-D surface. How hard could an egg be?
I remembered that NeoOffice (a Mac release of Open Office) had some sort of 3D rotate tool and i played with that briefly, taking two joined ellipses, slicing away half, and then rotating. There was a little dent, just where the seam is in plastic eggs. I fiddled a bit more then went to explore Blender (daunting interface) and Google Sketch Up, figuring i ought to get the “right tool for the job.”
While i was waiting for Google Sketch Up to install, i found that it was easy enough to use a photo as a tile bitmap using the same “Area” dialogue box i’d use to fill the simple shapes. And then i noticed the point editor. By using the context menu “Convert > To Curve,” i had points and handles to create Bézier curves.
I searched for a reasonable photo of a simple egg in Google images and then used that to “trace” the egg shape. I overlaid one side with a simple rectangle, selected the egg-shape then the rectangle, and used the option under the “Modify” menu: “Shapes > Subtract.” That gave me a half egg shape for the 3D rotation object. I then used the context menu “Convert > To 3D Rotation Object” option. As i write up this documentation, i realize i was lucky. I always made my half egg objects so the curve was to the right and the straight axis on the left. NeoOffice seems to just rotate around a vertical axis parallel to the leftmost point of the shape.
I believe i got the bitmap banding of the Joshua Tree photo a bit by luck. In the 3D Effects pane under the “Textures” button, there are projection x & y options. By switiching to “parallel” at some point the photo became repeated in stripes. It was a crop with a long horzontal dimension: that must have some effect on the tiling result. It’s not clear at all to me how the image resolution is managed. I lucked out.
Extraction from NeoOffice remains an issue. To get a resolution reasonable enough for photo printing, i decided just to make the egg as big as possible in NeoOffice, use the context menu “Convert > to Bitmap” (which puts the 3D object in a white box) and move to Photoshop.
I do find it interesting that NeoOffice uses the glyph hints in the Apple Chancery font more creatively than does Photoshop: glyph variants for the final y and r, as well as the capitalized E were chosen. On the other hand, the resolution and rendering weren’t nearly as good as Photoshop’s. I could stand to learn more about exporting from NeoOffice, apparently.