WIP - Island in the sea 2005-05-29 - By KMKrieger
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At 03:44 PM 28-05-05, Dave Gray wrote:
>Thanks to all for the praise, comments and suggestions. All noted - Kris,
>Tony and John being the latest.
>
>I must admit I am battling with the island size(scale) and texture. I did
>add an anchor rope for the boat (image not posted) and because my wife liked
>it the way it was I have submitted it to the Gallery. :-)
I don't know whether this will help, but there wa a plug-in available a
while back (might still be, I just don't know) called trueScape, by Ted
Southard. It's a tool that lets you convert a greyscale bump map. I think
the file has to be a greyscale image (but check...) and it accepts BMP,
JPG, GIF, PNG, TGA, and TIFF files.
It was a tS4.x plugin, but works just fine (as far as I've expereinced) in
tS5.x and tS6.x.
So, if you wanted, you could use that to create an object using it. Run it
through "Solidify" (an old plug-in), which makes it more stable. You can
then use the deform tools, point edit tools, booleans (most of the time),
and so on.
To enhance it even more, you can then apply the original bump/transparency
to the Color part of the Shader tool to the object - so, for example, if
you have bumps that are to be boulders, and say the lower areas are to be
gravel or grass or whatever, you can use one texture-image as the base via
the Shader tool, and then, as above, create a second layer and apply the
original bump/transparency to the Color part of the Shader tool to it ((BUT
you have to remember that, although Black is transparent on Layer One, this
is reversed on layers 2 and higher)). Also remember to apply the layer-2 (See http://yer-2.ora-code.com)+
transparency to the Reflectance shader - that way, you cold make shiny
grass dotted with matte boulders, also, if you add a third layer, you could
use a separate transparency only for the reflectance (make all others
transparent with the bar a tthe bottom of the color and bump shader boxes)
and that way, you could make the lower parts of the island lookn wet (since
the waves would be lapping up on the shoreline).
Don't ask me about alphas (I never use them ebcause I always seem to get
black "haloes" around the objects rather than fuill transparency, so I gave
up on them a few years ago and exclusively use specific transparency
maps). I don't use Symbiont because I had trouble with it from the
beginning, couldn't get it to map properly. So I exclusively use Shader Lab.
That being said, tho', SL has soem transparency procedurals and I'm sure
that Symbiont would as well, so, if you hate using transparency maps, you
could probably usea shader. It's just that, using the same image as the
basis for the obect and the bump and the texturing, everything meshes
properly and you know exactly where the transparencies are going to be applied.
Another little trick with transp. maps is that you can finagle your image
to create droplets. So, you could for example have the shoreline all shiny
at the bottom, and then add in a sprinkling of Noise (in PSP at least) to
make it look like maybe some spray had hit higher up. ((This is also neat
for making fountain spumes.))
In connection with this, ther is a cool shader for ShaderLab called
Invisible that lets you cast shadows through a greyscale/B&W image without
any artifacts appearing on the parts that are supposed to be invisible.
If that's confusing, let me know and I can prob. dash off a few
illustration/screen caps, upload, and provide the URL.
One thing I've done is to make the background of my bump map solid black,
and then start the future object with a mid-grey - that way, it's easy to
boolean subtract a cube so that you're just left with the actual object
(this also of course reduces your polygon count). You can also copy,
mirror, rotate, etc., to get a "mirror" of the object, and then boolean the
2 halves together - although sometimes it won't boolean (I guess very
roughly maybe 2% to 5% of the time...)
One trick is to lower all the numbers in the Boolean Properties box to
their minimums and UN-check "delete edges" . I've found over the years
that this leads to *much* more success than the default settings.
HTH!
- Kris Krieger
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