WIP: Erobelis Isle

[wdmartin]

Yes, I've been working with a 16-bit PNG for the actual purpose, but it was too large to upload to the forums (10-ish MB, when the forum only accepts up to 4.7 MB PNG files). So I uploaded a JPG for illustration purposes.

Does anyone know if there's an equivalent for Gimp's Bump Map filter in Photoshop?

[su_liam]

There is an equivalent to Bump Map in PS. It's Filter>Render>Lighting Effects. I think. Should be good enough to find it. Use the Directiona light type and make sure to drag the lighting direction bar so that the black node is in the upper left and the white node is somewhere below and to the right of it. That will make parallel-beam light coming from the traditional northwest direction. The bump map needs to be placed in its own _channel_. In the filter window set the texture channel to that channel.

Trouble is the Lighting Effects filter is strictly 8-bit(damn!). If you have Wilbur, just set the texture to all white(Shader list, under altitude, go to the color list and remove all of the color rows except one that is white) and save that as a PNG texture(right above Binary Terrain Surface, which is my favorite choice for saving elevation data).

You can then open that image in PS, copy and paste it onto your map and composite it as you wish. The results are hard to beat or even equal with the hillshade routines in most GIS apps.

[wdmartin]

All right, here's a shot at that.

First I went to Wilbur, opened my 16-bit grayscale PNG, and used the shader list to remove all colors except white. That yielded this:

Erobelis-take-4-for-lighting-effects.jpg

(It's in JPG format here strictly to meet forum file size requirements; my copy is a 16-bit PNG.)

Then I went to Photoshop, opened up my image, went to the channels tab, made a new channel, and pasted the Wilbur output into that channel, thus:

erobellis-channel-screenshot.png

Then I used Filter > Render > Lighting Effects.

There is no option to create a "directional" light source. The available settings are: Point, Spot, Infinite. Out of those, Infinite made the most sense. I arranged it so the light fell from the northwest, set it on some fairly conservative intensity and height settings, and set the texture to the channel I'd saved the Wilbur data to.

Before lighting effects:

erobellis-lighting-screenshot-1.png

After lighting effects:

erobellis-lighting-screenshot-2.png

It's not so great. Have I messed up somewhere along the line? I played with the settings a bunch and didn't find anything especially attractive.

[su_liam]

Okay, the white image from Wilbur is not meant to be plugged into Lighting Effects. The result of that would be completely wrong!
It's a fully-developed shaded relief to be used in place of Lighting Effects. Simply paste the image in as a layer, and set the opacity and mode as desired to show any underlying content.

Sorry about any confusion!

[wdmartin]

Ah ha! That would account for it.

Yes, I just put in a multiply layer containing the white image from Wilbur, and it works much better.

Erobelis-take-4-colored-relief.jpg

Thanks for bearing with me. This is the first time I've used Wilbur, so I'm still very much in the awkward-first-steps phase.

Still need to do something with the ocean, but I think I can figure that out. Also there's no caldera -- but I think I may let that go for now, simply because I have so much other game prep to do between now and Saturday.

[wdmartin]

Okay, coming together now!

Erobelis.jpg

I added some forests, a scale and a name for the island, and added some texture and depth-hints to the ocean.

I'd like to thank everyone for the help. Also, I didn't comment on it earlier, but that technique for shield volcanoes looks really cool su_liam.