User-created generators are showing up in a steady stream now, we’re happy to report. Some of our favorites:

• A street sign by JaySticLe, made with the Billboard GOG.
• A spinning button by runningdog, made with the Blender Generator Wizard.
• An iPhone screen by an anonymous user, made with the Billboard GOG.

You can browse more on the complete generator list. So as not to be lazy and leave everything to users, I made a generator too - a green-dyed river as a practice run for St. Patrick’s day. I would like to talk just a little bit about how I did it. The generator looks like this:

It is made exactly like a billboard with the Billboard GOG, with two important differences to the regular rectangular billboards most people are making:

• I wanted photos to be blended with the water, rather than on a blank background. So I unchecked the option for blanking the background. That part was easy.
• I wanted the photo to be behind the people on the bridge (and the bridge itself), and to lie within the borders of the river, which aren’t really straight. So I uploaded a “mask” I prepared in a drawing program (I use GIMP, but you can use Photoshop or anything like that).

The mask I used looked like this:

Preparing the mask took some time, but people who do photo editing regularly could probably do it much faster than I did. After the mask was uploaded, all I had to do was lay out a 3D rectangle that approximated the surface of the river. I did the geometrically correct thing, and it looked terrible. Photos of people would show with shrunken heads and vastly expanded necks, which is not very attractive. So I chose a more aesthetically pleasing (if less geometrically accurate) angle, and that worked out a lot better. It is funny how often taste and physics diverge in computer graphics…

We’ve added a tutorial for the Billboard Generator Generator (a tool that lets you project pictures or text on any flat surface). Support for masks has been improved, so it is even easier now to project to non-rectangular surfaces. For example, here’s a stop-sign generator:

And here are some boards created recently by users:

Notice JaySticLe’s use of masking for the fingers over the piece of paper on this last one.

(Update: fixed broken links to user boards, sorry about that…)

The back tattoo generator looks a little more human now. Honestly I don’t know what I was thinking before, with the ugly gray color and terrible lighting.

More and more user-generated billboard designs are showing up; see the “related designs” section of our original ye-olde-billboard-generator that has been on MakeSweet since time began.

Looking at what people have been doing with our billboard generator generator, it seems many of you would like overlaps, so that objects in the foreground can partially cover the billboard.

Done! Look at this new “Laptop at Meeting” generator, made with the billboard GOG:

It puts pictures/text onto a laptop screen. The key novelty here is that, if you look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see that the laptop screen is partially covered by an arm. You can now make generators just like this yourself - check out the new “show mask” button in the billboard GOG. The user interface is very simple, just scribble with the mouse over the foreground area - and if you need to undo a bit, hold down the shift key and “unscribble”. Enjoy!

The picture and animation generators on MakeSweet are designed in Blender. and then converted to a high-speed cached form for the web. For a while now, it has been possible to submit blend files on the site and have them converted to a generator for you. This process has now been fully automated, with the new and improved Generator Wizard.

If you’re interested in learning more, there’s a tutorial write-up on making a custom cup generator. Basically the process is to first have a good idea:

Then implement it in Blender:

Then upload it and make a generator like any other picture mixer generator.

Easy!

The behind-the-scenes plumbing for all this is a little complicated, so we’d really appreciate feedback from Blender folk on this beta service. Thanks!