December Entry: Ursea

[Jaxilon]

This is looking GREAT!

[Ascension]

The best that you can do in PS is the text warping tools - which you seem to already know. The little sliders can adjust the vertical or horizontal scale of the letters and this is handy when the labels are close to the edge of the image...you can pinch the bottoms or tops of the letters together for labels at the top or bottom and you can pinch the sides for labels at the sides. Normal arcs are fine for the stuff in the middle and as you get nearer the edges you slowly build up the warp. Me, I'd draw the image as a rectangle then put on labels then flatten the image and then use the distort-spherize filter on each of the globes. Doing it the first way allows for more control of how large or small the text appears and the latter method can produce some text that is quite large and looks out of place in the middle of the globe and the text at the edges can be really tiny. But those are the two methods that I use.

[Diamond]

This looks fantastic so far, Cereth. Kudos.

[Sapiento]

Fantastic progress!

[ravells]

Looking beautiful so far!

Another option for warping the text to the shape of the sphere in photoshop would be to use a displacement map of a sphere (i.e. a heightmap, white to black using a radial gradient). Displacement maps are also great if you want to have text that looks like it's following the topography of the landscape (just use your heightfield as the displacement map).

Another way is to use 3d modelling software, project just the text on a white sphere and render it out.

[cereth]

The displacement map sounds like a good idea but i can't really get it to work right. it doesn't seem to be warping the text enough. So far the "Spherize" filter seems to be working the best.

[ravells]

Cool!! Glad you found a solution!

[Ascension]

I've never had any luck with displace in PS. I know what it's supposed to do but PS doesn't seem to do it right, at a minimum it does it poorly. For small input values it does almost nothing but at some point, as you increase the input values, it just stretches pixels and creates no real depth. It can produce some interesting warp effects, like looking at something on the bottom of a creek, if using a very complex displacement map (like a clouds render) but with very simple displacement maps (like a sphere) it screws up the edges so you have to crop those out.

Here are my examples. The first image is just an image. The second image is a complex displacement map. The third image is the result of using the distort-displace filter with values of 50 horizontal and 50 vertical, stretch to fit, repeat edges pixels, and the complex displacement map. If you use "tile" instead of "stretch" it really messes things up and if you use "wrap around" instead of "repeat" it gets even worse and combining the two crappy options doesn't do much more damage. The fourth image is a simple displacement map. The fifth image is the result using distort-displace with the same settings as before and the simple displacement map.

So I find displace pretty much useless. It's good for warping images but it doesn't really map them to a surface like in a 3d program. Maybe PS CS4 does it better but my plain old CS doesn't. Anyway, just thought I'd share.

[ravells]

That's interesting, I didn't test the displacement map with a sphere (just thought I'd suggest it), but I found it did pretty well with displacing text so it looked like it was following the contours of a heightmap. Just knocked up a quick example here.

[cereth]

Here's another update showing the progress on the labeling. I'm trying to give the suggestion that the text conforms with the sphere but keep it legible at the same time. I'm using "spherize" on each label individually, giving labels closer to the outside a higher percentage than ones nearer the center. It's not perfect, but it seems to be working pretty well. The city markers themselves are not set in stone yet and I don't have any ideas for a border really yet. I'm thinking of keeping that pretty simple though.