You can generate a warped background in three steps:
• you apply warpers to a sheet to warp it
• you squish the warped sheet between two parallel transparent planes
to obtain the crumpled look
• and you apply colours to the sheet and to the light sources to view it.
Each of these steps needs the subsequent ones to be executed to have a visible result.
Clicking in the warping window redraws the warping (if modified). This window can be resized by dragging its bottom right corner.
See "Registering" for limitations at different registration levels.
See the "Copyright" section if you want to add a reference to the program in Web pages using background tiles it generated.
All the warpings shown in the "About BackgroundWarper…" screen come from this program, the screen set to 32000 colours.
See at http://perso.club-internet.fr/ggyory/Warper/warper1.html for more tips and tricks.
#Warping
is done by the warpers, each of which has
• a position with respect to a grid,
• a phase setting and
• a weight setting.
They also have a global
• Waveform setting
(new in version 1.2 and not recognized nor saved by previous versions).
Warpers in the center of the grid have no effect (and inactive warpers are displayed there).
Warpers with higher or lower Weight setting will have more or less effect.
# --> Quick start (Clue)
Open the program, bring the Squishing setup window to the front and select Droplets in the Squishing method popup menu. Come back to the Warping setup window, click the Set tile size button and set a square tile (use the Uppercase key) of about 120 pixels. Resize the Warping window to the size of the tile using its Zoom box (upper right). Put it next to the Clue window and compare.
Notice the droplets at places with a majority of white (or black) lines (with respect to the periodicity). The two types of droplets will never blend. Drag a line a little farther with the mouse (notice that a warper was selected in the Warping setup window and its Phase setting modified) and click in the Warping window to redraw the tile. See how the change in the lines is reflected in the tile. Displace the warpers in the grid and see the changes in the Clue window. Try to figure out a modification and then obtain it. Try the effects of the Waveform setting (new in version 1.2).
Go to the Squishing setup window and modify the Thickness setting. Redraw the tile and notice that you have modified the thickness of the (no-majority) region between the droplets. Augment the Shift setting and notice the white droplets grow and the black droplets shrink. If you want to make the black droplets grow, you must invert the black and white lines: select each warper and click twice the +25 button.
# Warper setup
On the warper position grid you can drag and drop a warper to a different position or place a new one (if you have free warpers left) by clicking on its intended position. To deactivate a warper, put it to the middle point or drop it outside the grid.
If you click on a warper, the corresponding phase and weight settings will be highlighted. If you click on a setting, the corresponding warper will be highlighted. If you click in the Clue window (the first click may just bring the window to the front), the warper corresponding to the closest line will be highlighted.
The highlighted settings can be changed with the two sliders next to them, by dragging and dropping values between phase settings or between weight settings of different warpers, and the phase settings can be changed by dragging a line in the Clue window.
#Squishing
You can change the appearence of the tile by choosing the Squishing method (Crumpled, Mosaic, Toothpaste etc). Experience to see! (To have the same contours with Toothpaste as with Droplets, you have to augment the Shift setting by 25.)
The Tilt parameter set out of center means that you squish a non-horizontal (=tilted) warped sheet which will be plied differently (instead of returning to the horizontal position under pressure).
The Thickness parameter changes the density of the squished effect. Intuitively, this comes to flattening the warped sheet more or less between two transparent planes before looking at it and thus creating more waves or whatever.
The Shift setting changes the level at which the warped sheet will be first plied. (The right Shift value to set two parts in the tile to equal size may be out of 0 for an asymmetrical tile and a tilted sheet.)
See the next item for the special properties of the Mosaic and Droplets settings
# Mosaic and Droplets
settings are somewhat special in the sense that
• Out-of-center Tilt settings have no effect (a warning is shown)
• The Shift setting does not have a circular effect
• Thickness setting acts on the size of the flat area between the mosaic pieces or droplets
If you obtain a flat sheet with nothing (or just some wells) on it for the Mosaic squishing method, try to augment the Thickness parameter value or to lower the Shift parameter value closer to 0.
If you obtain an (almost) everywhere flat sheet for the Droplets squishing method, try to lower the Thickness parameter value to under 100.
#Rendering
depends on
• the positions of the two light sources
• the five "cardinal" colours of the sheet, the two light sources and their shades.
You can drag and drop all the colours between the boxes and edit those in the rounded boxes by clicking on them.
The cardinal colours are shown in the five big rounded boxes. Boxes above are hints for you to find harmonizing colours. Hints are turned off while the colours do harmonize.
Below the rounded boxes (in flat ones) are previous values for undo purposes.
In the top right (Clip) three editable boxes can store colour values (which will be saved in the data file).
The four sliders set the intensity of the lights and shades applied and thus help compensate light balance changes caused by light positioning with respect to the warping pattern (possibly striated more densely in one direction than in another).
You can copy and paste the all the rendering settings to another tile (Edit menu).
# --> Quick start (Rendering)
Start the program without opening a document. View the result (click in the warping window) and go to the the Rendering settings.
Drag the radius pointing to the Sun (or the Moon) icon at the left to a different position and view the result. You have just displaced the light source. Its colour is in the big rounded box below the same icon on the right.
Click in this box. In the standard colour editing dialog that appears change the colour of this light by clicking elsewhere (not on the same diameter) in the colour circle or changing just one component of the colour. Click OK (not Cancel) and see what you've done to the Rendering dialog. View the result now and abhor.
The new (flat) box under the edited colour holds the previous colour which you can drag back to the edited colour box to undo the change. The square boxes which appear above the colours hold proposed colours to restore colour harmony.
Drag its proposed colour to the other light source and do the same to the two shade colours. View the result and enjoy. After another change of light try the proposed colours for the sheet.
# Colour harmony
According to theory, complementary hue values give the best effect with respect to a given sheet colour. (Just try to set colours for a warping without a clue and you'll see the difference.) Of course, you have the right to set weird and eye-straining colours for your Web page, but will people stay on it?
You have obtained colour harmony for your warping if no overflown paintpot is displayed (see COLOUR OVERFLOW) and the hint boxes above the rounded colour boxes are all turned off but one (above the sheet colour - as there are two hints for the sheet, you cannot satisfy both). (You can still drag the correct color from the boxes turned off, though.)
To have a not-too-weird-looking tile, sheet colour should be darker than the lights.
Different settings may give special effects, e.g. a light sheet colour with both colour and shades even lighter (you set all the colours and then darken the sheet a bit) can give a mother-of-pearl effect.
If you want something special, try to obtain colour harmony first and then change some colours slightly in a symmetrical way.
# Palettes, pipette
For use on Web pages and 256 colour PCs you have a palette of fixed colours and .GIF file formats use 256 colours at most too. Graphic Converter will reduce colours as you need them (set "Netscape palette" and "Pixellize" in the Image -> Colours -> Options) but the sheet colour may become dithered, using pixels of different colours side by side. Worse, the dithering may be disrupted where tiles meet in the page. To avoid this problem, you can set the colour of the sheet (the problem mostly sets in here) exactly to a colour in the Netscape palette. Click first on the palette drawing, then drag & drop a colour from the palette to the (sheet) colour rectangle.
The pipette will work also in the background tile already drawn and it can be made to work in most other places on the screen. If you find a nice colour in an icon, click on it, drag on the palette rectangle and drop. The icon will return to its place and the palette rectangle will keep the colour until you leave it. Click again & drop the colour where you want to.
Those of you familiar with ResEdit can add further palettes to a copy of the program: having the colours in the pixels of a little image much wider than high, copy it, then paste it to a new PICT resource numbered 204 (and on), then add its name to the end of the Setup menu. This works from version 1.2 and on.
# Colour overflow
Imagine light is white and the sheet is black. What colour will be the shade? It should be blacker than black, but it cannot. This is colour overflow.
One or more of the three colour components (Red, Green, Blue) can overflow when in the shade hint (calculated from the sheet’s and light’s colours) it is out of the 0% - 100% interval (but it will be reset inside for display). Normally, if you drag the colour of the shade hint back to the light rectangle, in the shade hint box you'll find the colour the light used to be; now this is not the case. Colour harmony is disrupted.
Colour overflow will be the most annoying (in order) if
• the sheet colour is saturated and light colour is close enough to the extreme opposite colour (in the Picker's colour circle).
• the sheet colour is too dark and light’s too light (or the inverse)
The overflowing paint pot image will alert you if colour overflow happens and you can change the sheet’s or the light’s colour to avoid it. To come back to the limits of non-overflow, drag the colour of the shade hint back to the light rectangle and then repeat this operation once more.
#Movies
You'll no more be among the first of those who want a sequence of cyclically and continuously changing backgrounds in a Web page.
This is not (yet) supported by Netscape Navigator (nor by the speed of most of the processors), but you can still put the idea to use. First you generate an image sequence, then you either build an animated .GIF file or use the MooVer shareware (JPEG compresson works best, or else the .MOV files will be BIG) or put the images in one folder and set to programming in Java.
The Edit -> Image sequence of… command will vary the shift settings in the top three rows of the corresponding warpers and save the images (if you registered). For shorter sequences they will vary less to preserve about the same continuity, but don't make illusions about very short sequences. (Let me know if you want more options for that.)
Be sure to have plenty of disk space - for a 50-images 120 * 120 pixels movie you'll need about 4 Mo (the movie itself up to 1,2 Mo, depending on the SQUISHING method and compression).
To save an image sequence you need to save in PICT format - see "Registering".
#Copy, save etc.
You can copy tiles you generated. (A 128 * 128 tile can then be pasted as a desktop background too.) The same tile, saved in a .JPG or .GIF file, will give your HTML page a seamless warped background (which will optically look tiled with a much bigger pattern than it actually is, especially if you use many warpers).
From a program registered at the "light" level you can save the warping configuration (to obtain the same tile again later and modify it). From a program registered at the "full" level you can save the tile in a PICT file too (for transfer or for making movies).
In most cases it is better to compress in .JPG than in a .GIF file. Both are accepted as background tile formats by the browsers. (GIF files are limited to 256 colours, so they use dithering to approximate smooth colour transitions and the compression rate of these (irregular) colour sequences is not very good.) There are lots of utilities which do the job, ex. Graphic Converter (New picture from clipboard, then Save as...).
#Registering
aka. "What more do I get if I pay?"
There are two levels of registration, called "Light" and "Full". Upgrading is possible.
In the unregistered version, you have 3 warpers going as far as 5 from the center. You cannot save tiles in native format nor in PICT format. You can copy the tiles to the clipboard though (more comfortable than screen copies and cutouts, isn't it).
In the "Light" version, you have 5 warpers going as far as 5 from the center. You can save tiles in native format but not in PICT format. For this reason, you cannot save an image sequence to generate an animated background.
In the "Full" version, you have 15 warpers going as far as 21 from the center. You can save tiles both in native format and in PICT format and save image sequences by the "Image sequence of…" command in order to generate an animated background.
Visualize the welcome page several times for more arguments, then go to the Labirynth in my homepage
http://perso.club-internet.fr/ggyory
to find more!
# How to register
You can register at Kagi.com, going to the page
http://order.kagi.com/?OVC. Secure SSL payment is possible, the link is on the same page. The
• BackgroundWarper Light (12$),
• BackgroundWarper Full (30$) and
• BackgroundWarper Upgrade (to Full, if you have the Light version
for the same username,18$)
options are listed as 3 differernt products. You can pay by credit card and you will get a registration number (which depends on your name) to enable Light or Full level use of the program. This is the quickest and less costly way compared to transfer by banks.
I'm looking for people to translate BackgroundWarper to different (important) languages in exchange for a full registration - contact me for details.
Notice that registration numbers for previous versions are still valid.
#Copyright
You can use the generated background tiles in Web pages and the like but I would be grateful if you included the BackgroundWarper logo in the page (possibly with a pointer to the page where you found it). The "Write logo in .GIF file" command in the File menu will provide the logo.
You must have my written permission to use the tiles in a software product (as in a tile collection or a tool to generate new tiles by customization like changing colours, contrast etc.). In this case, mentioning the origin of the tiles and giving a pointer to a Web page for getting BackgroundWarper will be obligatory.
No warranty comes with this program though several people have tested it and I think it performs fine. If you find any bugs, let me know about it.
I encourage you to distribute the unregistered version free in an unaltered form. If you publish it on a site or CD-ROM, please let me know about it. You must have my written permission for commercial distribution as well as for distribution in an altered or registered form.
#The author
With diplomas in pure mathematics, computer science and in information systems I have made the design and programming of
• an expert system of information site security audit
• a form edit/send/fill in/evaluate system in Java/HTML & NewtonScript
• the cryptographical protection of a videoconferencing system on Internet
• a Query by Exemple interface for a semantical network of linguistical data
• an analysis tool for realtime execution traces, learning from the traces of tests,
as well as managed an international project of a production management system. Currently I work on animated image compression.
I am always interested in a creative computing problem solving / design / development job, but just a contact is fine too.
