So, Voßhage. Glücklich? Besser mit Version 2.4.x benutzen

I often needed this kind of plugin to add some depth to images and always used creepy workarounds to get my results. Yesterday I started thinking about the problem of dynamic blur radiants and now “Moderated Blur” is available as a Python-Fu plug-in for GIMP.

This plugin enables dynamic transitions between blur radiants and can be used for a lot of camera- and optical effects (example). It uses a grayscale map to determine the blur radiant and can be configured with some options:

• Moderator: Select the layer that will be converted to greyscale and that will be used as the “blur map”
• Min Blur: The minimum blur, used in black areas of the map
• Max Blur: The maximum blur, used in white regions of the map
• Accuracy: The amount of different regions. Each region is blurred on its own so this raises render time.
• Order: Which blur intensity should be composited on top? Use Min for sharp edges and Max for soft transitions.
• Scale: Use logarithmic or linear blur radiants. Logarithmic blur starts softer and creates a nicer field of depth.

Installation

Download the script, unpack it an move it to ~/.gimp-x.x/plug-ins/

Usage

• Create a layer with grayscale content where white will trigger the highest blur radiant and black will use the minimum blur. Move it whereever you want in your layer stack, you can even set its opacity to 0.
• Select the layer to be affected
• Choose Filters -> Moderated Blur
• Choose the moderator layer you created, make other settings and start the process
• Optionally remove the moderator layer afterwards

Examples

Focus on my shitface

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Field Of Depth

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Tilt Shift (Fake Minitures)

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Depth with edges

(Yes, the mask was dashed off – just thought as a demo)

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Version 2.4.4:
* libwww-perl as dependency in control file and as target in --setup
* Bug in creating autostart entries in GNOME and KDE if xplanetFX is the first
  application installed in a fresh home folder

The stars in the background looked kind of … wtf?! And finally we have copyleft details in the screenshots again .)

For the ones who love to observe this strange happening born in Ireland and borrowed by the U.S. guys – here it is: our planet as a stupid looking pumpkin with a silly plug in his head orbited by a small – erm… basketball? Whatever. Have a good time while celebrating!

Please note: this template will only be available for a couple of days – like the Christmas Special.

Damn.. I’ve forgotten to mention some of the original artists of the base images in these screenshots – sorry for that! The original templates and the template information on the website of course do have the copyleft information included.

Debian Weezy is installed and Calf and Ardour are compiled – the studio seems online again. As long as I use Ardour the dark blueish theme with the industrial grey faders was biting my eyes. So I decided to mod the original dark Ardour UI templateb a bit, the result can be downloaded here.

You have to determine where Ardour is installed, usually in /usr or /usr/local.

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf ardour_dark_ui.tar.gz

or

sudo tar -C /usr -xzf ardour_dark_ui.tar.gz

To demonstrate the new features of the render engine in xplanetFX I created two new templates relying on the version 2.4.0 (but working in older versions, too – just without the new candy stuff). The first one is “Art” which generates a “wooden” sphere that is composed over the original earth and the other one is a xplanetFX branded template referencing to the start screen of the xplanetFX GUI. This one generates a “realistic” mirror of the earth with clouds underneath the globe.

The main new feature in the rendering engine is the ability of templates to hook in the render process and to execute custom functions with a limited set of commands inside a sandbox. So after every step xplanetFX has done it asks if the template wants to do some rendering stuff, too. This will be the base for a lot of cool effects and more realistic lighting stuff for example.

Although the template processes are run in a sandboxed environment with just a few commands like xplanet, convert aso I recommend to avoid using templates you stumble upon out there in the wild that contain a “process” file. Templates aren’t even allowed to copy, move or delete stuff but better safe than sorry ,)

Here are two other tests I used in the development that aren’t available as templates: clouds floating over a perforated earth and subtle to harsh color manipulations separated by a dynamically created mask (the original earth swirled around a bit).

Version 2.4.0:
* New feature: templates can hook in the rendering process to execute graphical
  processings in a sandboxed environment with reduced binary access
* New feature: xplanetFX --geometry auto
* New feature: xplanetFX --templates (gives a list of all installed templates)
* New feature: xplanetFX --debug
* XFCE >= 4.6 uses xfconf backend
* Environment variable determination transfered in encapsuled function calls
* Debug tries to determine the installed distribution
* Debug throws information about the installed ImageMagick version
* Fixes in greek language file - many thanks to vagrale13!
* ASCII Art in --help .)

Just as a reference to my actual conversation with Yours-Truly (de) in the depths of this blog ,) Technically far from perfect so perhaps there are some updates in the future when the optical flaws bug me to harsh. And perhaps there are some other styles in the future – Vossi (or here) always wanted to see tons of astro-garbage gyrating around our planet – this theme seems to be the perfect container for that ^^

Version 2.3.6:
* Use gsettings and gconf always in parallel if installed - thanks to the fucked
  up GNOME backend (testing!)