Hello Everyone,

I have made a tutorial with Camtasia and turned it into a Flash (SWF) video which you can download from my site. I don't know how long I will keep it up on my site, but I am hoping that someone at Hash will make it available from their server.

The link is:

Magnifying Glass

Please send me any comments which you may have.

Regards,

Eugene

Nice. I never could get that right. Now I know why. Thanks.

Excellent work as usual !

Very clear and precise.
Thanks for putting this together Gene.

Another good one Gene!

Nice tutorial with great info!

Your tutorials has a the right pace (at least for me) and you also have a very pleasant voice. Thank you for your time!

My own experience when it comes to modeling a lens is to try to make the shape as realistic as possible in order to avoid distortions. This has already been discussed at length in this thread and there is also a movie and project file to play with if you like to

A nice, clear demonstration.

Real glass usually has an index of refraction of about 1.5 or so (depending on the type of glass) rather than the 1.15 you used. I'm sure you knew that already, and that your figure was based on what looks good rather than reality.

Here's my version after following the tutorial... I put a pose slider on two bones to alter the thickness of the lens.

In the tutorial, the reason for the distortion of the bug, is because the curve on the lens was not true. I took the right half of a sphere and turned it 90 degrees then duplicated it and used it for my lens.

This keeps the lens more true.

Here is a movie of the pose slider going from 0% to 100% and the project. Enjoy

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for the comments...

I know there are a million ways to do the same thing in AM and everyone has there own preferences...which is really great because you can learn a lot of new things by doing the same thing differently each time!

Cheers,

Eugene

Thanks Eugene
I appreciate your work on these tutorials. I always find the, wel paced and easy to follow(well mostly)
Chris

Thank's Gene another nice tut ,very usefull and well done ,cheers

[nit-picking] Even a perfectly spherical real world lens will have distortions - try Googling for "spherical aberration" - light rays passing through the outer regions of the lens will focus at a different distance from the lens than those rays passing through the inner regions (resulting in blurring).[/nit-picking] To be honest, for A:M it's not critical, and I think a small amount of distortion gives some weight to selling the magnifying glass effect.

Gene thanks for the tutorial... It certainly gives me a great starting point.. BTW, If you put a sun above the lens, does the bug go up in smoke? (Just kidding)

Thanks again!

MMZ... why does the object in the upper left move when you are moving the pose slider..? it is almost as though the lens is in front of the camera rather than the handheld glass (framed by the black ring) magnifying the bug.

Incredible. I was thinking the other day about tracking down an old tutorial on magnification in A:M.
Now you post your tutorial and others have helped by adding even more great info.

Many thanks for this!

(Doin' Vern's happy dance!)
Rodney

Stuart,

I wasn't nitpicking, just pointing out a fact. A lathed surface in A:M will have that 'join point' in the center. Plus the rings making up the surface weren't spaced to get a 'nearly' perfect curve. It was more of a plateau, so we witnessed more distortion.

I was just showing how to get a more optically correct curve on a surface for those who might be interested.

Oakchas,

The 'object' you are seeing in the animation is actually the shadow of the magnifying glass I made. The lens mesh is actually changing shape and causing more magnification, just as real glass with more pronounced curves will do. You were seeing the shadow of that glass changing shape.

I'd also like to point out that Eugene has made an EXCELLENT tutorial that I could only dream of producing and I was only trying to expand on his idea.

Actually, I was trying to indicate that *I* was nitpicking!

Stuart, President of the Pedants, Nitpickers, and Associated Quibblers Society.

I just realized that the project file I referred to earlier in this thread actually has a rather important error. Probably no one has noticed, but hopefully the project file is correct now.

[attachmentid=15196]
[attachmentid=15197]

Slightly offtopic, but I won a Wallace & Gromit DVD using a scene rendered out in Animation Master. It wasn't the £10,000 first prize, but it was still worth entering.

The idea was to "invent" a tea-making contraption. One of the features of my invention was a magnifying glass that starts the whole heating process.

One day I'll have the time to animate it...

Surely you have the time to post a still of it...?

On a related note, there was some discussion here a couple of years ago about creating dispersion effects for glass. For those that know nothing about dispersion, it's the phenomena by which the index of refraction for a given material depends upon the wavelength (read:colour) of the impinging light. Still confused? Think about how a prism splits white light into its component colours. Another way of seeing it is that different colours get magnified differently.

Anyway, Marcel Bricman outlined a technique (one using a plug-in he wrote, another without using the plug-in). I followed this up with an animated test. My original post to this can be found here - as I write this, the links to Marcel's instructions and to my test anim still work.