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Kai’s SuperGOO By Donald Rosenfield — cardar@home.com SuperGoo, for use with Windows 95 (or higher)/NT4.0 or Power Macintosh OS7.6.1 (or higher), is MetaCreations’ update of their wonderful Power GOO program. Like their older and smaller program, they provide a fold-out Quick Reference Guide. If you wish for a manual, you can find it on the program’s CD-ROM. Each panel of the Guide delineates one of the major functions of the program. These are the Fusion Room, the Face Palette, the GOO Room, Making GOOvies, and the all-important Importing and Saving. Obviously you are not limited to the images supplied on the CD-ROM; you can GOO up your own images. As noted in my previous review, the free images that come with the program are copyrighted and thus cannot be published without the permission of the copyright holder. They are just there for practice. The Fusion Room—In the Fusion Room you create faces by combining differing facial features from the face libraries or from your own pictures. So, drawing on your pictures of your cats you can put the features of your Siamese on the face of your Ragdoll or Norwegian Forest cat or your mother-in-law—Hmm. That might be an improvement. Below the Image Canvas are the Memory Frames, which you use to store the current face. The Face Palette—The Face Palette is part of the Fusion Room’s control features. You can add accessories such as hats, mustaches, or beards to the picture on the image canvas. You have control over the hair, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, and the shape of the head, all for male, female or mixed faces. You can reposition features on the face, increase or decrease the size of the features, rotate selected features, and stretch the features horizontally or vertically. You might have difficulty choosing a feature were you limited to viewing just one at a time but there is a button you can click to see twelve at a time. Each of the features is added on a separate layer. That means you can reposition any of the features without affect-ing the rest of the face. There is also an option to combine facial features both from an existing library of those features and from those on your own pictures. That procedure is called cloning. The Clone tool in the Edit palette allows you to duplicate an area on your source image onto the face in the Image Canvas. This figure is a rather horny dollar. The GOO Room—The Goo Room is where you get the really funny stuff. You get to distort images and create GOOvies. The tools let you play with the images as if they were fluids. You get separate Brush and Goo Effects Palettes. As we are working with layers, you can add text to the top layer of your image. To save your image from utter destruction as you mess it up with GOO there is a Global Undo. Believe me; you are going to need it! The Brushes allow you to control noise, pinch or bulge a feature, twirl, smear, smudge, nudge, GOO-plicate, smooth, or unGOO. The available Effects are zigzag, ripple, twirl, zoom-rotate, stretch, squeeze, spike, vortex, and wave. The Guide shows the effects of any of the palette brushes or effects to cut down on your messing up your images. Making GOOvies—You can start with an unmarked image, placing it in the first of a series of keyframes. As you stretch, warp, and smear your image, using a library of customizable distortion tools, you place each changed (improved?) image in the next keyframe. You can preview your animation inside SuperGoo or you can render out an AVI or sequenced BMP (Windows) or Quicktime and sequenced PICT (Macintosh). The All-Important Importing and Saving—You can use scanners or digital cameras to put your own data into SuperGoo, or choose from a library of images on the CD-ROM. These can all be output for animation, print, web design or illustration. You can open a file in BMP, PICT, PSD, TIFF, JPEG, FlashPix or PhotoCD formats. You can save your GOOed pictures in a number of popular image formats including those above. You can use the saved picture in another image-editing or page-layout application. Also, you can access MetaCreations’ website www.metacreations.com or at 805-566-6200 for additional information on this product. List price is the same as for the older program, $49.95. CDW offers it at $45.66. Requirements—WINDOWS—16Mb Free RAM, 25Mb HD Space for Installation, 40Mb Free HD Space (after Install), CD-ROM Drive, 16-bit video, 14" Monitor MACINTOSH—16Mb RAM allocated to application, 25Mb HD Space for Installation, 40Mb Free HD Space (after Install), CD-ROM Drive, 16-bit video, 14" Monitor |
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