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Crop Circle Rendering - How the drawing was created
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Crop Circle Rendering
- How the drawing was created
— The Process of Rendering the Silbury Hill Crop Circle Image —
— Related Pages —
Contents of this web site are Copyright © 1993 - 2009 Paul Jacobsen©™ [TGD] unless otherwise noted.
Graphics produced with Xara Xtreme Pro 4. Tactical Graphic Design - Visual Communication Specialties - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Crest and logo concepts must be designed to be visually unique in order to 'stand
out from the crowd'. They must also be germane to the organization they represent
such as these RCMP crest design concepts.
Logo, crest and emblem designs & concepts will ideally contain additional, deeper
meaning or information wherever possible.
The example crests illustrate this point. It's title is "Watching Over America", and
we will illustrate how the obvious and the subtle convey this message.
Image: Nick Nicholson ©2004
Related Articles:
— know the differences between web page art and printed artwork.
— how vector graphic design produces such clean artwork.
The Blue, green and red lines are guides
which were eventually used to 'slice' the
basic shapes into the correct segments to
assemble the final image
The digital rendering process for this crop circle rendering was created in Xara, a
vector software package which means it is comprised of mathematically defined
geometric lines and shapes that can be filled and textured in any number of ways.
An example of this process is below.
Vector software is essentially like drafting in AutoCAD rather than painting or
drawing in PhotoShop and other 'bitmap' image applications. Bitmap applications
and vector applications both create images but in very different ways.
The Aztec / Mayan glyphs in the bezel rings repeated four times and with vector
software it was possible to create one pattern-group, then replicate and rotate it 90°
into place in the outer rings. The wing patterns (reminiscent of those representing
the Egyptian God Ra) followed the same procedure except that repeating, smaller
ellipses were requires to form the layers of the wings. Those sections then had to be
sliced into their smaller segments. (See example outside of the bezel.)
After one pattern was created a duplicate was rotated 180° to form the opposing
pattern. The element groups of the wings then had to be ungrouped in order to place
the segments in the proper front / back placement to create the proper overlap /
layering. The final stage was simply selecting each individual shape and line and
applying the appropriate 3D effect to form the final image.
A Thought About Crop Circle Creation
As a professional, the challenges were poignant to me in considering
the possible process of physically creating such a pattern in the crops!
What struck me was the thought and experimentation required to get
the layout and positioning correct, followed by the process of deciding
which segments needed to be removed in order to get the relief to look
right.
Furthermore, I considered that I was doing this from a bird's eye view
and that any errors, minor or otherwise, were correctable and not
evident in the final image. As all this sunk in, I tried to visualize how a
group of pranksters could possibly create such an image in the dark,
unseen, at ground level, with such precision, with no errors (since their
errors would not be correctable as mine were) and without leaving
'collateral evidence' such as footprints!
Over the years, as open minded as I am and therefore accepting the
possibility of these patterns being created by 'alien means', I found
myself, through this process, absolutely unable to doubt that these
patterns could never have been created by human means ... no matter
how clever those humans might be!
See Full Vector Drawn Renderings
