3D Heightmap Plugins v1.0

[Spikehead777]

3D Heightmap Plugins v1.0

 

Download

 

Made with CodeLab by BoltBait.

Hey all! This is my first plug-in for Paint.NET.

UPDATE: This plug-in has received a much-needed update! New features are listed below, also another plug-in is available!

 

Diffuse Plug-in (Effects -> Stylize -> Diffuse)

Description:

This plug-in is very similar to Emboss in what it does. What this plug-in does, is it takes the current image as a height map, shines a light on it, and returns the intensity of reflected rays as another image.

 

Examples:

Various spheres with the diffuse plug-in applied on them. This is demonstrating the full movement capabilities that you have. Notice the center sphere.

 

The above image was rendered 49 times under different settings. Some post processing was applied to create the alpha around each sphere. The center sphere had the light pitch at 90, right above the image. The next series had light pitch at 45. The third series had light pitch at 0, in line with the image. The last outer series had light pitch at -45, underneath the image!

 

Each sphere in the above image was rendered from this image:

It looks a lot like nonsense doesn't it? Maybe this image makes more sense:

The former image is really a higher detail heightmap than the latter. To create the latter, I took the red channel of the former image and made it grayscale.

Anything you can draw on Paint.Net will work. (old image)

 

 

Specular Highlight Plug-In (Effects -> Stylize -> Specular)

Description:

This plug-in is very similar to the diffuse plug-in, but it's different in that it creates a highlight on the image, to give it a shiny effect, almost like gloss or metal.

That's what a highlight looks like if on a pure black sphere.

Combine this with the diffuse plug-in and you can make many 3d looking objects, even chrome-like!

Features:

Light source with 360 degrees of movement around and 180 degrees above and (NEW) below the image

Pixel "Scaling" -- If your image comes out too short or too tall along the "Z-axis", you can scale the pixels of your image down, so that the highlights and shadows are balanced.

(NEW) High quality settings allow your image to remain crisp and smooth if a correct type of heightmap is supplied.

(NEW) Added specular highlight plug-in to create specular highlights on a heightmap!

(NEW) The original plug-in (Was Illuminate, now Diffuse) is now much faster than before (I was rendering the whole image for each thread XD...about many times unnecessary. XD).

Seamlessness!

 

EDIT: CodeLab seems to disallow input of decimal values. This work-around changes the inputs so that it's a percent input, instead of decimal scale input. Not anymore, these plug-ins now has support for 2 decimal places with CodeLab.

I hope that with these plug-ins comes a great contribution to the community.

 

Edited December 2, 2018 by toe_head2001
Reattached Zip

[jerkfight]

Awesome Effect. Great work.

[MiguelPereira]

This is very good. Nice work

[oma]

I haven't had a lot of time to play with this one yet, but what I see so far I like.

here is a quick one of a part of a brush I'm currently making.

thumb here full size picture in my gallery page 5

[R3VENGE]

this will really help in adding lighting to stuff thanks

[vista?]

As much as I like it, this plugin caused my PDN to freeze and so I had to End Task with Windows Task Manager.

[Spikehead777]

As much as I like it, this plugin caused my PDN to freeze and so I had to End Task with Windows Task Manager.

I have noticed that this plug-in does run a little slow. I don't know if it's because of compiling it in CodeLab instead of using a true compiler. Also, remember that this is my first plug-in using Paint.NET, so some code might not be optimized well. =/ Regardless, I'll see what I can do about fixing and cleaning up the plug-in.

Remember, the bigger the image, the longer processing on that image will take, and that's true for just about any image plug-in.

[IceFusion]

Thanks for the plugin, haven't tried it though. Hope I have time tomorrow.

[Blooper]

Yay! More C4D work! Thanks a lot for this.

[Edit] Kind of disappointed, the results are rather choppy .

[Edit] Starting out big and resizing later seems to work.

[Spikehead777]

Yay! More C4D work! Thanks a lot for this.

[Edit] Kind of disappointed, the results are rather choppy .

[Edit] Starting out big and resizing later seems to work.

C4D?

Yeah, the results will come out a little hard-ish. One thing is that Paint.NET only really allows 256 different color values (if standard 8-bit grayscale), so you don't get many pixels to work with, and also it returns another 8-bit image as the result.

What I can suggest, is that you either make your image larger, perform Illuminate, and size the image down like you said (which is how modern antialiasing in GPUs work), lower the height scale value (Between 0.01 and 0.2), or blur the image (3-6 gaussian blur kind of looks good).

Also, on a related note, I have found that you can't put in decimal values into the plug-in. It seems CodeLab doesn't allow this. I made a work-around to the plug-in, so those that downloaded the plug-in, please re-download. Instead of a minimum scale of 1 : 1 height change per intensity with the old plug-in, it becomes 1 : 100 height change per intensity. I'll have the work-around uploaded shortly.

[007 Nab]

Very cool plugin -- thanks!

[Simon Brown]

C4D?

Cinema 4D (Wiki this)

[R3VENGE]

Also, remember that this is my first plug-in using Paint.NET, so some code might not be optimized well. =/

why dont you release the plugin source so others can help improve it?

[Spikehead777]

why dont you release the plugin source so others can help improve it?

I packaged the CodeLab source along with the work-around, when I first uploaded the work-around.

[BoltBait]

Nice plugin. Please check your PM's.

[Blooper]

Great! Thanks for the extra work

[Spikehead777]

A new version of this plug-in is available, along with another helper plug-in. Read the first post for more information if you haven't already.

(Taken from first post)

Features:

Light source with 360 degrees of movement around and 180 degrees above and (NEW) below the image

Pixel "Scaling" -- If your image comes out too short or too tall along the "Z-axis", you can scale the pixels of your image down, so that the highlights and shadows are balanced.

(NEW) High quality settings allow your image to remain crisp and smooth if a correct type of heightmap is supplied.

(NEW) Added specular highlight plug-in to create specular highlights on a heightmap!

(NEW) The original plug-in (Was Illuminate, now Diffuse) is now much faster than before (I was rendering the whole image for each thread XD...about many times unnecessary. XD).

Seamlessness!

[Blooper]

Sweet.

[PeterPawn]

When I tried to use these plugins, all I could get was a look that looks like emboss/relief effect. How did you get them to look like the spheres/orbs that you're showing in your examples?

I can't make the black ball with the white shiny hilight on it.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Description:

This plug-in is very similar to Emboss in what it does.

That's what the plugin does.

Anything you can draw on Paint.Net will work.

So SpikeHead777 created those images in paint.net and then played with the plugin to create the specular highlights on them.

[pdnnoob]

Hmmm...<opens diffuse plugin> 1st color. kewl...woah wait a sec. 2st?! 3st!?! 4st!?!?! ya that needs to be fixed. cool plugin, though

EDIT: I was just playing with this plugin for about an hour, but I still can't figure out what settings you change to adjust what and how your original image should appear to get the best results. I'll post some of my results later, but they aren't looking too great.

Edited November 18, 2011 by pdnnoob

[ScrapbookWithPDN]

So, is this a dead plugin? I only ask because, like "Palette from Image" plugin, which is dead, when I went to check it out and clicked on it, there's no file extension, just a series of numbers. If it's just a serious of numbers for a download, does that mean don't bother with it? Thanks.

[toe_head2001]

1 hour ago, ScrapbookWithPDN said:

when I went to check it out and clicked on it, there's no file extension, just a series of numbers.

 

I've reattached the Zip file, so it should download properly now.

[MJW]

Not to push my own plugins (okay, actually I am), but the Texture Shader does something similar, and quite a bit more.

[ScrapbookWithPDN]

LOL... I'll revisit yours...and, it's ok to toot your own horn at times.

 

Also, I found an old post about how to deal with downloads that are only a series of numbers, to name it and add the .zip file extension on the end while saving it as a download.