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Texture Merger


MJW

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Dear Pixey! <3

 

Excellent work. My result. Is something wrong. I feel really stupid. Sorry for the late response. You are far too kind.
Thank you so much. 

15-11-2016.png

 

Edited by Seerose

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Gandhi

 

mae3426x.png

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Seerose, you have the wrong image in the clipboard. Instead of the black-and-white grid, you need to have the height map of the sphere with the grid added. I.e,

 

TextureMergerGridSphereMap.png

 

(This is the height map produced in Part II of the tutorial.)

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1 minute ago, MJW said:

 

 

Dear MJW! <3

 

Despite video I have done it wrong. Slowly I'm with the nerves at the end. :P

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Gandhi

 

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@MJW - I am working on a revised video and will show what you suggest, about clicking on another slider when adding the values.  I had figured that out, but didn't want to put it in the video in case it was confusing.

 

@Seerose - don't feel bad ............ I made the same mistake a few days ago and got the same result.  I had put the Texture Height Scale 255 in the wrong place :roll:

 

It is easy to make a mistake as this Plugin is very complex.  When making the video I got confused - at the time on the video of 9:30 - where I add 'Subtract' first and then change it to the correct setting of 'Canvas'.

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"Rescuing one animal may not change the world, but for that animal their world is changed forever!" anon.

 
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Seerose, try it again, using the image I just posted. I think you will be successful.

 

As Pixey says, it's a very complex plugin, with many, many things to keep track of. Believe me, I still get confused by things not working how I expected them to work. (Usually it's because I forgot to change a control back to the default value after changing it in a previous step.)

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Dear Pixey and Dear MJW!  <3 <3

I tried again. Look, it worked. From the heart a thousand thanks. :cake: :coffee:  

 

151116hms.png

Edited by Seerose
Image forget
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Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Gandhi

 

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19 hours ago, Seerose said:

KISSKISS.gif Dear Pixey and Dear MJW!  <3 <3

I tried again. Look, it worked. From the heart a thousand thanks. :cake: :coffee:  

 

 

Seerose, I am delighted you finally were able to make the sphere!

 

Good for you, looks great!!!     :mtdew:  :cake:     :)

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On 11/16/2016 at 9:46 PM, Pixey said:

Yay @Seerose - what a lovely result!  So glad you got it in the end :D.

 

Dear Pixey!  <3 

Thanks for this great tutorial. :trophy:  Excellent guide! :cake:  :coffee: 

Edited by Seerose

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Gandhi

 

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Dear @Woodsy!  <3

 

Your work is fabulous. :trophy:  Thank you very much.  :cake:  :coffee:

 

Sorry! I'm out of rep points, catch you tomorrow! B)

Edited by Seerose

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Gandhi

 

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  • 4 months later...

MJW, is it possible for you to give us some settings in this plugin to make a round object look spherical. I've played around with it and I can't get the color right. Or even a tut that a layman can understand. I don't understand mapping displacement or merged height-map. I'm still learning! 

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46 minutes ago, Woodsy said:

MJW, is it possible for you to give us some settings in this plugin to make a round object look spherical. I've played around with it and I can't get the color right. Or even a tut that a layman can understand. I don't understand mapping displacement or merged height-map. I'm still learning! 

 

I think it would probably help to start with the Texture Shader plugin. In terms of complexity, the Texture Merger is like the Texture Shader squared.

 

Nevertheless, I'll briefly explain mapping displacement and merged height maps.

 

A merged height map is a combination of two different height maps. There are a number of ways they can be combined. The most common is probably to add a texture, like a leather texture, to an object, such as a sphere. The goal is to produce a sphere that appears to be covered with leather, like a basketball. The Texture Merger is intended to allow textures to be combined.

 

Mapping Displacement is the way the object affects the image that's mapped onto it. I'll use Texture Shader examples. If you paint an image onto a sphere, the image bulges, which is what makes the sphere look round. That's what the Surface Offset mapping modes try to do. On the other hand, if a sphere reflects an image in front of it, the result will be very different. That's what the various Reflection mapping modes try to do. In each case, the image in the clipboard is distorted by the height map in the canvas. That distortion is what I call the mapping displacement.

 

Note: The default Mapping Mode for the Texture Merger is None, which is probably why the object didn't look round. The default mode for the Texture Shader is Surface Offset 1, so it will probably look round with the default settings. You also need to make sure the Texture Height is appropriate. If it's too small, the object will look flat.

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Thanks but I still don't understand. I've always been one that learns from an example not by reading. Say you have a green oval, how would I turn it into a green egg without distorting the color? What settings on which texture plugin?

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Okay, now I understand better.

 

The short answer is that that's not what the Texture Merger or Texture Shader do. You need to have a Height Map. For the egg, preferably a 24-bit map, which means that the R,G, and B channels are treated as a single number. The Texture Merger is intended to make it easier to produce height maps.

 

For an egg, I'd start with a sphere height map, like this:

 

Sphere_Transp_BGRA.png

 

You can use the Texture Merger to make it oval instead of round.

 

First, copy it to the clipboard

Run the Texture Merger.

Set the Merge Method to Clipboard (No Displacement).

Set the XY Proportion to 0.12.

Set the Merged Height Scale to 240. (Note: this only affects the shading, not the final height map.)

 

Enable Show Shading, and you will be able to see what the shaded height map looks like.

 

Now you can disable Show Shading and exit the Texture Merger and you'll have an egg height map.

 

If you want to shade the egg green, set the Primary Color to green and run the Texture Shader.

Set the Image to Primary Color. (Image is the image that's mapped onto the height map. It can be a fixed color, or from the clipboard.)

Set the Texture Height to 240.

Position the Directional Light to improve the results. (The default straight-on light direction is pretty boring!)

You can adjust the speculariy controls if you want to make the egg shinier.

If you want to make an Easter egg, you can put an pattern in the clipboard and set the Image to Clipboard.

 

 

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Thank you MJW! I'll digest this info and play around with it some. I was not disabling the shading and exiting Texture Merger before. That's probably the reason for the color being distorted.

Congrats on your Galleria Nomination! If you had a gallery I would have mentioned it in there. The galleria is a well deserved place for your pocket watch!

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 @welshblue, I like answering questions about the height-map plugins, so ask away!

 

I'm not sure what you're asking for with the Render Square request. Do you want something that will render a cube with different rotations? I need to improve my plugin that renders sphere height maps, so I would certainly consider adding additional features, or perhaps creating a new plugin.

 

I'm currently working on a  new plugin that will render certain kinds of height maps. It should be quite useful, I think. I keep getting distracted by other things, but hope to finish it soon. There's one -- somewhat significant -- problem I'd like to solve first. Maybe I'll release a beta version of what I have now.

 

Right now, there's no universal solution to producing different height maps, so producing a specific one is rather ad hoc. The proportions of a height map can be modified by copying the map to clipboard, then running Texture Merger with the Height Merge Method set the Clipboard (No Displacement). Two height maps can be combined by setting the Height Merge Method to Maximum.  For example, if you have a height map of a long cylinder, like a tube, and a height map of a sphere, the sphere can be added to the end of the tube by using the Maximum Height Merge Method. It is often helpful when using this method to enable the rather obscure feature, Weight Clipboard Heights by Opacity. This allows the clipboard height to be offset (to move the clipboard object forward) without the heights in the transparent areas figuring into the maximum comparison. (Possibly this should be enabled by default.)

 

A trick I've used if I have a height-map that's almost the shape want, but not quite, is to distort it with a tool like Grid Warp. The problem is, this mis-interpolates the heights as if they were colors, so the resultant map is rough and ugly. Often, though, it can be smoothed using the Texture Smoother plugin. That's the idea I used to produce the apple shape for my OOTF apple entry.

 

Many of the Height maps I've used have been produced by making the profile I want, filling the outside of the profile with black and the inside with white, then blurring to round the edges. Very often, I blur a little (a pixel or two), copy the image to the clipboard, blur some more, then use BoltBait's Paste Alpha to make the region outside the object transparent. I then use Texture Smoother to smooth the height map. Different blurs produce different results. Two Motion Blurs and right angles to each other, can be useful.

 

Another trick is to start with a height-map shape with rounded edges, then Multiply it by a sphere (or ovoid sphere) in the clipboard.  That's the method used to make the heart example on the first page. The outside will fade to zero height, while the inside will be spherical.

 

If you have a specific shape you'd like to produce, describe it on this thread, and I'll try to come up with a method to produce it. We'd both probably learn some things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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@welshblue I have a comment on the Texture Scaler thread which may help with producing beveled rectangles, along with other such shapes.

 

I'll try to provide an idea for the wings soon. I think the the basic idea is to make a texture map that matches the way you want the wings to bend, then use the Add mode of the Texture Merger to combine the wings with the shape to you want them bent. (Or I should say "combine the wing," since I would guess it's easier to do one wing at a time.)

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