On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 22:37 +0200, Pedro Alonso wrote:

I have designed some mockups for that tool, and I would to get some feedback about it.

And you may see the mockups here:

http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot1f.png http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot2f.png http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot3f.png

Hi Pedro,
I'm really excited about your project as I do quite a bit of digital retouching. Here's a few tasks I'd like your tool to solve. It's quite a list ;)

Tasks
-----

Vanishing Point (VP) is useful for retouching in perspective. Clone objects, remove objects by duplicating repeating patterns around it.

* Copying or cloning objects from and to different planes. This will require setting up multiple planes. A typical use case: I have a door that I want duplicated on a different side of a house. Will the planes define not only the perspective transform but also the size aspect? That would either mean having to define planes of the same size or have a mean to define relative sizes I guess. Will I be able to copy a door in front and paste it all the way back scaled correctly? * In case my previous assumption is false, I will probably need transform tools (scaling mostly, rotate may be useful too) within a transformation plane. Typical use case: I have a door I want to paste onto a perspective plane, yet the source door was much closer to the camera than the plane I'm pasting to (or there is another source image in a different resolution). I need to scale it down.
* Being able to revisit the plane setup. Will the setup be saved in the XCF similarly as paths or selections are? Typical scenario: A client changes mind and wants 3 doors instead of two. Not having to set up the planes for this again is a big plus. Also being able to tweak the plane setup at any time is a plus - not every image makes it trivial to set up the planes and you may see your wrong setup only after pasting stuff in wrong perspective.

I'm sure things will be really tricky but I'd love all the visual feedback to tell me I'm working in a "translated" environment. The brush outline cursor should translate as it should. Live previews of pasted buffers should look appropriate. Selection tools' previews (marching ants) should be translated appropriately. The plane boundaries should be clearly visible to illustrate the canvas will be behaving a little differently than usual (if you really intend to use a regular GIMP image canvas for this..).

Random UI suggestions (very little value here ;) ------------------------------------------------

My take is you probably don't need to have multiple plane setups per image so having some sort of VP toggle similar to our quickmask would be sufficient. Toggle it off - work just like normally. Toggle it on and things get translated based on the planes. The tricky part is how to provide a mean to add, remove and edit the planes that fits in the current UI.

Another solution would be to provide a completely separate environment with duplicated select and clone tools. Something like how the imagemap plugin "takes" the drawable into its hands. I believe that's how Photoshop VP does it.

And another rather random suggestion for the "work on a regular GIMP canvas" paradigm - when pasting a buffer coming from a VP's plane onto an image without such setup, the buffer should be "translated" too (like when using the corrective mode of the perspective transform tool). It would be useful to build a "library" of objects for easy cloning in an image.

And finally, some more crack -- maybe it would be nice to have some basic "mesh" objects to define instead of simple planes. Imagine you would want to clone a grafitti onto a round tv tower top. It would be sweet to be able to define a "sphere" made of small planes. You'd have your source plane with the grafitti and the target sphere...

Anyway, I wish you best of luck in what appears to be a gigantic undertaking to me. I hope this unordered mess of thoughts was more useful than discouraging ;)

cheers

Pedro,
In the 2nd mockup, it didn't look like one could resize the perspective selection. Will there be center anchors to easily resize the perspective? Or better yet (I think) have the perspective apply to the whole image. i.e. select the perspective from a small section of the image. Then borrowing on Jakub's suggestion, have multiple perspective definitions as in the path tool. Perhaps enhance the path tool with an option for a path to be declared a perspective definition. Is what I'm getting at clear? If not I could try a mock up myself.

Jakup - wouldn't it be easier to move the door first - then take the picture? *grin*

Apologies for my previous (blank) post.

Would it be possible to abstract this process so that the perspective is not limited to just a quadrilateral plane as the destination? If the transform definition could be a bezier path, could the transform use a more generic method (with spline mappings?) to transform the image being copied?

Below is a link to a very crude mockup of what I am attempting to say. Also, this is being submitted along the lines of brainstorming; I think that project as it currently exists would be useful in and of itself (and perhaps challenging enough).

http://flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com/GIMP/Temp/path-transform.jpg

A bezier path was drawn around the pathway in the middle picture. The top picture (the bricks) were then mapped into the path, producing the bottom picture.

On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 10:37:17PM +0200, Pedro Alonso wrote:

I am Pedro Alonso, a SoC student working in the project "Vanishing Point clooning".

Great project.

http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot1f.png http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot2f.png http://www.pedroalonso.es/mockups/plot3f.png

I think it would be nice to get around having a modal dialog (one with Cancel/OK) for a more straightforward interaction.

How about having a tab next to Layers/Channels/Paths for perspective planes? You would create a new one by just using the p-plane tool similar to how paths are created. Each p-plane in the list could be toggled on/off. Every tool, as far as possible, should be affected by p-planes. The p-plane tab would also allow creation of selections from the planes (like with paths).

One think I'm unsure about is how to handle plane extension. With your example image, the same perspective is everywhere, so one would need a way to say the p-plane is defined in a smaller area, but covers all.
But if there would be a vertical wall in that image, you would need a second p-plane. Saying that one of them covers all of the image, except where the other p-plane is, wouldn't be good enough in some cases.
A solution could be to define for each edge, wether the plane extends in that direction.

--
Thorsten Wilms

Hi,
jimmac@ximian.com (2006-06-01 at 0145.44 +0200):

My take is you probably don't need to have multiple plane setups per image so having some sort of VP toggle similar to our quickmask would be sufficient. Toggle it off - work just like normally. Toggle it on and things get translated based on the planes. The tricky part is how to provide a mean to add, remove and edit the planes that fits in the current UI.

That solution is simple, but has a small difference with quickmask. With QM you can save to channels, it is slower, but solves the problem of losing past masks. So probably a similar approach could be used then, so you can store planes for later (the equivalent of channels) and thus be able to work with less crowded interface (only planes you really need at a given time).

Another solution would be to provide a completely separate environment with duplicated select and clone tools. Something like how the imagemap plugin "takes" the drawable into its hands. I believe that's how Photoshop VP does it.

Out of image editing is a bit sucky. If there is a way so it integrates with all tools, it would be really nice.

And finally, some more crack -- maybe it would be nice to have some basic "mesh" objects to define instead of simple planes. Imagine you would want to clone a grafitti onto a round tv tower top. It would be sweet to be able to define a "sphere" made of small planes. You'd have your source plane with the grafitti and the target sphere...

That starts to sound like 3d app with UV mapping. Poor Pedro. :]

GSR