Cookin' with Presets

This is not really a tutorial - I'm a hit-and-miss sort of graphicist (?), and so what I'm presenting here are some random observations aimed directly at helping you create pseudo-photorealistic presets in BladePro. I believe these thoughts can be applied to creating fabric-based presets (I did a pretty cool denim preset for a church project), wood presets, virtually any kind of presets designed to recreate actual materials or textures.
This can come in handy for more than just eye-catching decorations, glittering Web objects, or my own brand of high-caloric text. I recently fixed a friend's photo of his dad - with a totally black dead-of-night outdoor background - by replacing that background with a BladePro preset that, with some blurring, lighting effects, and drop shadowing, became a realistic flagstone wall. The effect from conventional texture filters would have been nowhere as deep or realistic. This filter is useful for much more than I originally imagined.

1. Unlike one's interpersonal relationships, playing around in BladePro often is the only way to get what you want. Witness the creation of my bell pepper:
 

The problem here was the color -- getting not only that uniquely pepperish red but that tinge of green that comes from picking the fruit too soon or FROM THE UNNATURAL BREEDING OF THE RED AND GREEN PEPPERS. It took me nearly a half hour to hit on the right color mix: Because the left Light setting often provides the primary color, I mistakenly tried for the red there. It turned out in this rare case that the right Light setting gave the preset it's predominant color and the left its green shading. Note that the Tarnish setting here had no affect -- the left Light was sufficient to edge and tinge preset probably because the top texture .bmp was scaled to its largest dimension.
Now, let's look at my cantaloupe:

Here, four elements contributed to the overall color: The primary green was offset by a corn yellow reflective .bmp, with the right Light providing shading and the Tarnish defining the netting of the fruit's rind. Iridescence helped deepen the color. Note: When using a light primary color, a black secondary Light is necessary to add shape to the object. Note 2: Until a totally rounded bevel is added to BladePro (hint, hint), the Height must be cranked down enough to simulate rounding, but not too much, or you'll flatten the object.

2. If you create your own preset .bmps, make sure they're tileable. I  myopically created many of my first presets using about 50-60 point text, and only after my presets were displayed at the BladePro Visual Archive did I spot some of the seams. The best ways to avoid tiling seams include:
Ensuring patterns begin on the left (or top) edge of the file where they end on the right (or bottom). Example: If the left edge of the image begins in the center of a ridge, the right should end at the center of a ridge, as well. If edges begin or end at an uneven point of a pattern, I'd suggest resizing the image within the frame to get even beginning and ending points.
Providing for generally uniform color or shading from center to border. This doesn't mean the image must be uniformly shaded; it just means that if you wish to repeat the image or pattern several times within an object or text, a dark center and a lighter edge (or vice versa) make for an obvious tile.
Creating the illusion of many elements. In a forthcoming alphabet soup preset, I attempted to distribute the pasta letters throughout the soup. I placed letters at various angles and intervals throughout the image area of the primary .bmp (none overlapping edges) so the letters would not be clustered at the center or edge of the final preset, indicating tiling.

3. Scanning the texture .bmp directly from an image of the object may or may not work. While developing a turkey skin preset for November, I scrapped eight or 10 unsuccessful Photoshopped .bmps that failed to create the goosebumps I needed. Finally, I achieved a satisfactory result only by using a section of a turkey image. Bread the same. On the other hand, a .bmp created from a photo of a strawberry has relentlessly refused to yield a desired strawberry effect, and my raw hamburger preset was not created by slopping ground chuck on the scanner.

4. Keep them files manageable. Some of my original presets were created with pasta.bmp, a virtual Godzilla of a file at 1.85 MB. Tony Cheroke, who inspired me to open the Cafe, as well as Angela at the Visual Archive, reminded me in the kindest way that some hard drives are much smaller than others. Heed Tony's rule-of-thumb: .bmps used for presets should be sized at 256 pixels square.

5. As physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer once said to Madame Curie, test, test, test. If you're going for photorealism, try your preset in a real-world context. Darth Tater on my recent veggies page was fashioned from my potato preset, and to test my cantaloupe, I applied it to a circle and spherized and shaded it. My wife attempted to consume it on screen with a sharp-edged spoon, and I now have power of attorney over her savings account (hee, hee, I'm kiddin', of course). Have fun.