iPad Emulation
Posted in Featured Projects, Latest, Tim Portfolio, Work - April 6, 2010 - tim
So the iPad was released to the wild last Saturday, and for most developers it was their first chance to have actual hardware to test on. Sure there’s the emulator, but that’s just not the same.
I’ve been working on a project for weeks now involving a high-def (H.264) video of an iPad application (for a pitch) and the problem has been how to build something believable from something you’ve never even seen (in real life).
As an example, part of the video involves using the iBooks application. The only source materials available before Saturday to work with were low-res screen shots from Apple, and their Guided Tours videos (which is why I was obsessed by knees the other day).
Specifically, in order to seem at least believable (or rather in order to not distract from the story we’re building by not completely rendering the actual interface) I needed to create the weird “secret library” spinning bookshelf effect that happens when you touch the Store button in iBooks to toggle to the online bookstore.
There are always those that will brute force through a problem like this – 50+ frames of skewing graphics in either Photoshop or Illustrator and laying off one frame at a time. But I was looking for something a little more elegant, something that could be repeated in a render-modify-render work cycle.
The first attempt was in Cinema 4D using a modeled “shelf” object, UV unwrapped and texture mapped with a front-side-back graphic created in Photoshop (you can see this UV map in the gallery above). The problem was twofold: it was very difficult to match the luminance of the 2D before screen, with the animation frames, and the resolving 2D after screen. And secondly, the texture map – while it looked great in Photoshop – lost resolution in the modeling environment. I’m sure it’s me – I’m not the greatest modeler – but I couldn’t figure out how to get the resolution back and since the target output was H.264 it needed to be there. And the old motion-blur trick is a cop-out.
I have never used the Extended part of Photoshop Extended, but – on a whim – I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised. The 3D tools in Photoshop can’t hold a candle to a package like C4D, but if you’re only modeling a simple box, it’s actually pretty great. I set up a 50mm camera (not to exaggerate the spin of the object in the frame), a single front light (which seems to be how the object is “lit” on the iPad), and mapped the high-res front, side, and back graphics to the box. The animation couldn’t have been simpler: just a 180 degree rotation in 1.5 seconds for around 45 frames (at 30 fps). (See the gallery above for a shot of the Photshop 3D environment.)
The best part about doing everything in Photoshop seemed to be matching the 2D before and after screens to the animation frames – they were much closer than what I got using C4D.
Bringing the frames into After Effects as a JPEG sequence made it easy to drop into the project, scale and match to the rest of the piece.
I’ll be posting the finished project at some point here, but suffice to say that the final animation looks pretty damned close to the real thing.
As best I can tell. I haven’t seen the real thing yet …
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