Molding n 1: the act of creating something by casting it in a mold [syn:
casting] …. Graft \Graft\, v. t. To join (one thing) to another, so as to bring about a close union.
Molding and Grafting, to me, is a somewhat advanced form of image manipulation and can be one of the first stages of drafting a design. This isnt “skinning”, because skinning would be a process of futher developing a draft completely from scratch, reference material or not. I’ve never heard anyone talk about or seen anyone write about it, so if anyone knows a term that is more accurate or has a link to material created by someone who does the same thing, let me know so I can check it out. I started using this method way back when I could think of an idea but couldnt imagine it in detail.
Bad Cyborg
My first example of using this method is a fansite for Halo: CE that I got into the development stage with, but never had to time to finish, so it got archived. Basically, I just thought of everything from
the game and decided that I would be able to find enough material to put together something that resembled the cockpit of a covenant ship. I didnt have the ability to capture footage straight to my pc, so I used my digital camera to take shots of my tv screen. I just went around in the game and looked for things laying around that I thought I might be able to piece together to form something coherent. (This is back before I had the ability to create all my material from scratch) I cant find the actual pictures I shot, but after turning pieces of the pictures into renders, I started to build a pile of pieces to choose from (click on the img for a larger version):
So, I just started up a psd, made a cockpit window cutout and started using the biggest purple pieces, from the images above, to cover the “frame” of the cockpit:
If you look closely, you can how I spun each copied piece so that the pattern would repeat as little as possible and the frame as a whole would look like one giant random texture. Once I got an idea of how much room I was going to have for the pieces, I decided that I could only shrink the pieces down to a certain size before I would start to lose the detail in them. So, I just played with the sizes until I found what looked best and then used the best pieces to make the “working parts” of the cockpit:
Then, there really wasnt much else to it, I made the bottom “control console” out of the left over pieces and used the enigmatic alien symbols as the controls on all of the “working parts” I had pieced together. To polish up the frame, I just used some well placed lighting from photoshop’s filters>render>lighting effects option. Then, gave it a black background and cutout the outside of the frame with some interesting looking geometrical outline.
The main purpose of the site and the logic behind the way the interface was laid out, though, was that it was meant to be a flash site. So, I pulled all the layers into Flash and did some basic tweening for the “working parts” to actually work. I didnt get very far with it, but you can check it out here if you want to.
Super Car Concept
Another quick example is something I did with my lame ass car. I wanted to “conceptualize” the idea of making it look like a super car, so I looked around online and looked for pictures of car parts that were photographed from the same angle that the picture of my car was taken. Or, I could have looked for the parts first and then photographed my car at the angle that I found the parts I wanted to use. Either way, alot of size transforming, perspective adjusting, and hue/saturation adjustments later, it turned out pretty good for my capabilities at the time:
2Calmpleks
Being the fan of 2advanced that I am, I named one of my most experimental sites after them, indirectly. With this site, I wanted to make a flash movie for the interface, but have it embedded in html. (oooh… extremely advanced, I know.) For the design, I was still going through the “website’s must look like a control room” phase. I knew I wanted to have some kind of futuristic looking interface, and I was starting to like the way that taking pre-made structural pieces and using the to form my own structures, made everything look way better than what I was capable of and how quickly I could put them together. So, I looked around online and found some texture maps from the game Quake (I think.) There was a TON of them and they were already hi-res on my pc, so they were perfect for the time being. I started up the psd, made an octagonal outline for the frame, and started picking and placing pieces from the texture packs I grabbed from Quake, or a mod for Quake, or whatever.I tried to keep the placement of the pieces as symmetrical as possible, but my skills were still lacking:
Then, I just went to every noticeable edge of all the pieces and used the smudge, clone stamp, and blur tools to make everything look like it was “molded” together:
Once I finished that, I made the door piece separately and dropped it into place. I used the lighting effects filter again, as mentioned before, and made everything look more dynamic. Like I said, this was a html/flash fusion project, but I dont have a page put together to show it in its intended format, but if you want to see the flash part of the site, check it out here.
Conclusion
These technique’s used with the smudge, clone stamp, and blur tools, I still use heavily. If I am struggling with an idea for a project, I will not hesitate to grab what I need and play around with it until I get a better idea of what im doing, however I will NEVER use reference material as source material anymore. I will put some more examples in a more advanced guide, later. But, the methods ive presented in this guide are only the basics and were only used to learn my way around photoshop. I never took credit for the texture’s I used and I’ve never used “borrowed” material in any of my client’s projects. Creating the graphics from scratch, such as the pieces ive used to put the projects in this guide together, are extremely time consuming and I will be creating tutorials from examples of my work in the future. For now, I only want to give the beginners out there some direction for getting their projects started. As for actual tutorials on Molding and Grafting, getting to the specifics of using the smudge, clone, and blur tools, I will be following up this guide with those soon.
If there is any part of the projects in this guide that anyone would like me to further elaborate on, just leave a comment and I’ll be happy to explain it in further detail. (except the flash parts, Ill be doing a tutorial on that as well, later)
- Molding and Grafting Guide: The Basics, By Wes Fierce
