Domain Shifting with Polar Coords

[Stroker1]

Gotta love Polar Coordinates (Polar Coords or PC). Too cool.

With a repeating pattern, something like this is fairly easy (tedious, but easy):

It's my old avatar at other forums. Hynotic, eh?

It all started with some of Kai's work:
KPT #22: Domain Shifts: Applied Metamorphosis

There were also some "Burst of Light" (BoL) tutorials that used the idea of domain shifting using Polar Coords. So I set about writing my own. Why? Because I discovered some rather interesting problems with using PC for domain shifting that none of the other tutorials discussed. Sounds like just the thing that I enjoy writing about.

Some detective work later and I wrote this:
BoL page 1b

It was a lot of fun discovering all that.

So, now that all that is figured out, what can be done with it? Well, BoL for one. Now lets look at some filters.

Filters:
Mosaic
Sheer
Waterpaper

Not all filters are conducive. If the left and right aren't tilable while in Polar Coords mode, then you'll get a vertical line after you run PC again. You'll have to play with it to see what I mean.

What else can be done? Well, squishing and expanding in a radial manner:
polarcoords2.jpg
Upper-left: original picture
Upper-right: Polar Coords using Polar to Rectangular
Lower-left: Some selections and Free Transform
Lower-right: Polar Coords using Rectangular to Polar

Major spiffy. It's a great way to make low-rider tires from a picture, and it keeps any text on the tire intact. You can even make the pedals on a flower extremely exaggerated if that's your thing.

Along the same lines, you can even do some trendy line streaks, except do them in a radial manner:
tomzoom.jpg (slightly poor example since I didn't use single line select)
Tired of trendy horizontal or vertical lines streaks in your trendy abstract shapes? Bah! Make 'em radial, I say.

You can even turn things "inside-out":
schoolthing.jpg
I did that on accident one day while looking for a solution to a different problem. After thinking about it for a bit, I realized I had turned it "inside-out" with the axis being a circle/oval with a diamter of half of the inscribed circle/oval. :whew:
(hint: Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical)

Just the beginning, folks. Lot's of exploring and tinkering to be done. Polar Coords has a lot of uses, and domain shifting is one of my favorite trick in my Bag o' Tricks.

play.fiddle.learn

[theKeeper]

Excellent stuff Stroker, thanks!

[sfm]

cool stroker I will come back and read all of this when I have more time as this is something I have yet to play around with :\
sfm

Thanks for posting this Stroker. I already read a part of Kai's web-site and yes, quite interesting. I have this one bookmarked now ;)

Thanks for your contribution

[theKeeper]

Man i still remember all those KAI pages he created/posted waywaywaaaaay back, even before i created this Web site (which was in '96). In fact, they're so old, it was hip to leave your page's BG colour as the middle (Netscape) grey!
Which is what KAI did with his pages. hehee

Just a short tip down memory lane there... aaa... [oops]