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During the development of KPT effects, testers expressed confusion over what KPT Scatter could do. We admit, it's not 100% clear as there are so many controls (and so many different things you can do) that it can be hard to understand what's going on.

Presented here (for the first time outside private beta newsgroups!) is one of the tutorials Andy wrote for the beta testers to explain how to get Scatter to do interesting things...

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I mentioned awhile ago how penguins can be used to send signals to UFOs. Well, I didn't actually, but I'm sure with enough training they could.

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1 - Source Image.

Create a big word of black letters on a white background, and launch KPT Scatter.

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2 - Particles.

Make two rows of penguins, the top row facing toward, the next row facing away.

Select column randomly, and select row based on luminance. This means we'll randomly choose penguins from the top row where there's black, and from the bottom row where there's white. In retrospect, it would have been much more sensible for me to have the top row of penguins black, and the bottom row white.

3 - Packing.

We want the penguins at the top to be behind the ones at the front, so choose top-down packing. Choose lots of jitter, so the penguins look like they're just milling around. Because the penguins are smaller at the top of the picture (I'll get onto that in a second) they look further away. But we want to be able to see more of them, so we need to adjust the density of the penguins based on vertical distance down the picture. At the top, they should be very densely packed, and quite sparse at the bottom.

4 - Variants.

The penguins at the top of the picture need to appear as though they're further away. Perspective would make them smaller. So vary scale by vertical distance - at the top make them smaller, and at the bottom make them larger.

We're not worried about the rotation of our Penguins, or their opacity, so set those to none.

5 - Colour.

Leave the colour panel at its defaults. Penguins are monochrome, and we dont want to change that.

6 - Shadow.

No Shadow.

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Violin! The penguins facing away from us are the ones standing on the letters (KPT, in case you can't read it! The final-output picture is a bit bigger), and the rest are facing toward us. Any low-flying space aliens will immediately rush out and buy KPT.

Download a preset file containing the settings used in this tutorial here...

Download for the Mac... (208k)
Download for Windows... (249k)

Tutorial by Andy Bearsley, editing and images by Matt Fox-Wilson. Penguins by Corel.

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