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...And An Even Bigger Piece of the Heavens

© Kathleen

Flaming Pear’s Flood - Ver 1.00 - Size 532 KB - Price $20.00 US Flaming Pear’s LunarCell - Ver 1.00 - Size 1,284 KB - Price $20.00 US After reviewing Universe in last month’s article, it only seemed fitting to review two of my favourite plugins by Flaming Pear at http://www.flamingpear.com//, Flood & LunarCell. All of Flaming Pear’s Plugins are cross-platform for use on both the PC & Mac & will work with Photoshop & Paint Shop Pro.

I’ll begin with the Flood plugin - Flood creates the exact look of water for your scenes. Flood covers the foreground in a user’s image at a default horizontal line & will reflect the background in your scene precisely for a exceptionally realistic look. Many options come with Flood including giving the user the choice of different views, perspective, ripples, waves, size, height, etc. Flood is the type of effect that would be nearly impossible to duplicate otherwise. The most desirable feature within the Flood plugin is its simplicity. There simply isn’t much tweaking a user needs to do to create a realistic effect. Simply leaving the default settings as they are should suffice. However, this plugin is one to experiment with to it’s fullest & if the settings you’ve chosen is not to your satisfaction simply press the reset arrow. After experimenting & finally arriving to the perfect setting, save the setting to your hard drive.

LunarCell - Just as impressive as the Flood plugin is Flaming Pear’s LunarCell. LunarCell creates realistic looking worlds in seconds. A user can even download clouds from weather satellites. Numerous options include planet size, texture, craters, ice, desert, cloud height, shadows, etc. A user can alter the axis & add cities for further effect. Increase the size of your world in percentages and/or to position simply drag the preview image to where you want. The only con regarding LunarCell that I could find is that it does not allow composition flexibility like Flood or Universe. I personally would like to see an option within Lunar Cell that allows the placement of the planet itself into a scene without the background being placed as well. Please note that the current version of LunarCell is now version1.20 which has animation support. The animation portion of LunarCell has not been reviewed by me because I currently own version 1.00.

Demos of these & other plugins by Flaming Pear can be downloaded from their website. As well there are visual examples & a gallery displaying images that have been created by various Flaming Pear plugins.

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