MJW

Seerose, assuming you were trying to achieve the gridded look, it appears to me to have too much displacement. I suspect the Merged Texture Height is too high. It's an interesting looking result, nevertheless. (EDIT: I'm not sure if your comment, "I didn't quite understand it," is meant as a request for help to achieve the gridded appearance of my example, or is simply saying you didn't understand it, but now do. If it's the latter, you can probably ignore my initial comment on how to "correct" something you may not want to change.)

No. The sphere image should be in the PDN canvas; the grid should be copied into the clipboard. The Texture Merger will combine them using the selected Merge Method, which for my example is Subtract. EDIT: Thanks to Pixey for providing the answer in a more detailed fashion.

Much, much better!

Very well done! I like different aspects of each, but I think I prefer the first. Mostly, I believe, because the angle of the light adds a sheen to the surface.

Perhaps someone else can add the spacing if Drew can't. If it can't be fixed, I can live with it, but I find it quite confusing, particularly when consecutive entries use very similar colors.

I hate to ask Drew for eggs in my beer (which is both demanding and disgusting), but could spacing could be added between the SOTW entries? They all kind of run together.

The Object Align effects are still plugins, not built in to PDN. I think they ought to be considered for incorporation as standard effects. They're so useful, and it's such basic functionality. I could hardly do without them.

PhotoBucket being down brings up a question (which is probably best asked in another Topic, but it applies to this one at the moment). Because I was unable to upload my entry to PB, and I didn't want to miss the deadline, I used the upload-file Forum-comment feature, and then linked the image into my comment. That seems to have worked just find, but I was unsure if that was a proper thing to do. If it isn't (and probably if it is) I'll link to a PB version once it's back up.

Thank you. I'm happy it was useful.

PDN, except for my avatar Chat Noir cat, and the moon, which came for here. I really hate using a stock image for the moon, but didn't have time to create my own, and have it look like I wanted. (This is a file I uploaded here instead of linking from my PhotoBucket account. PhotoBucket is currently down. When it returns, I can edit this comment.)

You could try the HSV Eraser. It isn't the easiest plugin to use, but it gives quite a bit of control

Thanks, Eli! Very useful idea. I'm glad I asked.

Very impressive, Eli! The skull-mask height map is really well done. I'm curious about your procedure for constructing it. One minor suggestion. If before adding the color, you run Texture Merger's little buddy Texture Smoother, you can eliminate the waterline irregularities on the surface.

That's true, but the version that Maximilian could use on his outdated system is, I believe, VS Express.

That's a very nice result, lynxster4! It's also a lot different from anything I've posted, which is something I like to see.

No headache at all. I'm happy to help if I can.

Thank you, Maximilian! If you can install Visual Studio in some form on your system, I'll be happy to provide the VS project code. There are some things that use features not available in older PDN versions, but I think they can be gotten around without too much difficulty. Perhaps I will get around to making 3.5 versions myself, but I've been busy with other things. I wish you'd get a newer system. Refurbished computers are very reasonably priced. I realize, though, that there are often more pressing needs for money. (I believe Visual Studio Express is what you'd need. It's a free download from Microsoft. As far as I can recall, I don't use any features that aren't available in older versions of C#)

Pixey, I'll give it some thought and try to figure our what could cause that problem. Are you using the two height maps from this comment and this comment? If not, make sure you do. The only way I could get anything close to your result was to slightly shift and scale one of the height maps.

If you have two versions of a shape, the original and one that's had depressions added, the procedure for combining them would be pretty much the same. If instead of depressions, the modified version had raised areas, then the merge method would be Maximum, and the offset to the clipboard would be a small negative amount. There are, of course, a lot of other things that can be done with the Texture Merger (which is why it has so many controls). If you have something in mind you'd like to do that seems as if it might be suitable to the Texture Merger, I'll be happy to try to figure out a way to do it. *I need to come up with a better name than "shape." I was originally going to use "object," but that's already used in PDN for regions surrounded by transparency. I chose "shape" because of Shape3D, but I forgot that "shape" also has a special PDN meaning.

Let me think about that. Are you sure you had the merge method set to Minimum and not Maximum? And that you had the original sphere in the canvas, and the gridded sphere in the clipboard, and not the other way around? Off the top of my head, those seem like the sort of thing that might cause that: that the grid is being formed by the original, unmodified sphere surface and not the indented grids. The original surface curves outward, so the direction would need to be reversed to form (less pronounced than they should be) indentations.

Pixey, are you trying to reproduce exactly what I did? If so, maybe I can figure out what step you're doing wrong. If not, maybe you should try to make the same image I made (using the same colors and light position) so I can diagnose what you're doing differently. I know from experience that it's a confusing plugin, and it's easy to have some control set wrong. This is the image you should have in the canvas: The clipboard should have the other image; the one that shows gridlines when shaded.

I added some more explanation to the third tutorial, so it's not quite so much: Do this; do this; do this; voila!

I certainly could have made myself clearer. What I meant was this image: The image in the canvas (see how quickly I adopt the new terminology!) is the original sphere map.

In the Plugin Index, Ego Eram Reputo used the term Canvas for what I called in my program controls the "Window." Canvas might be a better name for it. Any opinions on whether I should I change to Canvas in my next version? (E.g, Make Unmodified Canvas Heights Transparent.) Another change I'm considering is to make the Merged Height-Map Height cover the large range (0-1000) by default, and make the Checkbox scale it by one-tenth to reduce the range. Currently, it's the opposite. Any other suggestions to improve the interface are welcome. (Other than write my own UI forms and controls. That may be a good idea, but I'm not likely to do it anytime soon.)

Tutorial, Part III Now I'll show another useful idea that can produce images like this (and much more complex images, too): ---------- First, let me explain the idea behind it. In the above examples, I show two height maps. One map is the original sphere; the second map is the sphere with ridges "cut" into it. In the squares, the heights of those two height maps are virtually the same. In the ridges, the sphere with the grid added is lower. The Texture Merger has a feature that makes all the heights that match the window (or canvas) heights transparent. It also has a merge mode called Minimum which makes the merged height the minimum of the window (canvas) or clipboard height. Suppose the canvas contains the original sphere, and clipboard contains the sphere with the ridges. Inside the squares, the heights should be the same, so the minimums equal the canvas heights (and also the clipboard heights). Therefore, they will be made transparent. Inside the ridges, the clipboard heights will be lower, so will those will be the minimum heights, and those pixels won't be made transparent. The result will be the clipboard image with all the pixels not inside the ridges made transparent. The plan is to make two layers containing the original sphere. The bottom layer is shaded with the Texture Shader. The top layer is modified with the Texture Merger to leave only the ridges, then is shaded differently, One slight modification to the scheme is that inside the squares, the heights don't always match exactly, and sometimes the clipboard height is a tiny bit lower. (I don't know exactly why.) To solve this, I add a small offset to the clipboard heights to make them always higher inside the squares. [I now know why. It was a tiny bug. In one case I rounded the height to an integer; in another case I didn't. Even in the fixed version, the result is better when a small offset is added to the clipboard heights. Otherwise the edge where the squares and ridges meet is ragged.] ---------- The steps are: Copy the unmodified sphere height-map as a new image into PDN. (The image from my previous comment.) Run the Texture Merger with the following controls changed from default: Height Merge Method: Canvas Antialias: Checked (This step isn't actually required, but it makes the sphere map antialiased the way the gridded sphere map is. That will make the heights within the squares match more closely, so less of an offset will be need to be added to the clipboard heights to assure that the window heights are minimum within the squares.) Duplicate the layer. Set the Primary Color to Red (the first red in the color palette.) Run the Texture Shader with the following controls changed from default. Image: Primary Color Texture Height Scale: 255 Use Alpha from Texture: Checked Directional Light Direction: 0, -150, 50 Antialias: Checked Move the unshaded layer to the top. Leave the shaded layer visible. Copy the gridded sphere map into the clipboard. (From my previous comment.) Run the Texture Merger on the top layer with the following controls change from default: Merged Height Scale: 255 Height Merge Method: Minimum Make Unmodified Canvas Heights Transparent: Checked (this is the key to making it work) Antialias: Checked Show Shading: Checked Clipboard Height Offset: 0.0010. Uncheck Show Shading and click OK to save the height map. Change the Primary Color to blue. I used the medium blue from the Color Palette. Run the Texture Shader on the layer with the same settings as before. Merge the layers. Of course, both the squares and the lines could be handled in much more complicated ways. For instance, another texture could be combined with the layer that forms the squares (such as I did with the silver and gold sphere example). I wanted to introduce as few complications as possible.