A new book with a page turn

[Chris B]

It's been nearly a decade since I first turned pages in a book in premier elements. Inspired by recent posts elsewhere I've tried again - this time in Fusion 9.



The page images are of course place holders and could be video (still working on that). If people are interested I'll write up how I approached it and share the source file.

[Dave McElderry]

Holy cow! That’s sweet. Very nice!

[Steve Grisetti]

Wow!

[Chuck Engels]

You have always done amazing work Chris

Love it when you share how you do something and this really looks great.

[sidd finch]

Chris, you did a really nice job with that. Looks really good.

Sidd

[Chris B]

OK - first things first - here's the project file to try out. I've not distributed one of these before so we'll see how it works. If anyone manages to get this going could they let me know please?

Fusion.zip

Fusion is a node based editor and any external files are read in via a "loader" node that are light green and look like this:

Loader.PNG

If you unzip the project to c:\fusion then it should "just work". If you don't you'll need to go through each of the loaders (there are eight) and re-point them to the correct filenames. Select the loader and the filename will appear in the tools box.

If everything is in the right place you should be able to drag the "Render3D1" node to one of the panels above the node graph and you should see the book. If something's missing it (and all the associated nodes) will go red.

Click render and it should save a sequence of jpegs to c:\fusion. Edit the save location in the "saver" attached to the "Render3D1" node.

Fusion is available from here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion/ - the free version is fine.

[Chris B]

I said I'd write a little about how I approached this. I'm pretty sure that this is not optimal in any way as I'm very new to the program but I like the end result.

The first thing was building a book. I looked at various free models but couldn't find one that I could work with. I wanted a book that was nice and curvy since a decently thick book doesn't lay flat when it's opened. To do this I've used the "bender" nodes in Fusion that will take an object and distort it in various ways. There are handled on the tool to affect only part of the object as well. Here's one of my bends.

bender.png

The book pages start a as "cube" - I changed the length of the edges to make a box then applied my first distortion as a sheer to give the look of pages that had slid over each other.

cube1 (Small).jpg

I then used the applied two bends in opposite directions to curve the ends the pages.

cube2 (Small).jpg

cube3 (Small).jpg

I needed to apply a "transform" between these tow bends to being the end of the page back on to the axis of the bend. if you don't do this you simply undo the bend you just applied. Once I had one set of pages I could take two outputs from that node and transform one to mirror it to make two sets of pages. The advantage here is that if I tweak the bends at all both sets of pages are affected at the same time.

book pages (Small).jpg

The book covers are more "cubes" with the spine having another bend applied to it to curve it inwards.

covers (Small).jpg

Putting them all together an applying some textures I found online gives the final book model:

book (Small).jpg

[Chris B]

For the page itself we've got another "cube" - just very thin. I did try originally with two image planes back to back but the shadows cast by them were problematic. To make the corner of the page curl I've got another bend applied. However in order to make just the corner curl I rotate the page through 45 degrees first - apply the bend - then rotate it back.

corner curl.JPG

Animation is achieved through keyframes. Almost any parameter can be keyframed so when the book is closed the bends applied to the pages are set to zero and as it opens they are moved to their correct values. Obviously there are quite a lot of interactions so it can be quite fiddly and getting it to look right takes some time. Originally tried to have the left and right pages change to new images of the pages as the page was turned over - but there's something about the scaling that made them jump around. When animating the pages sometimes bits would show through from the back of the page. I increased the number of subdivisions on the surface in the object definitions then things become smoother and the show through dosen't happen.

Lastly there's a couple of lights to light the scene. Fusion is not a ray tracer so you have to be specific with the lighting and the renderer you use. Spotlights will cast shadows - and these can be soft if you use the software renderer. Again - some fiddling around is required to get the desired look.