You need to render a rock surface and you just have a diffuse map. How to convert it in a useful displacement map?

Most of times you open the texture in photoshop and work it in order to get your displacement map. But often we just get really rought surfaces. How to improve it?

In this cases a really useful tool in Photoshop is Cutout filter:

Cutout reduce the nuances present in the image, thus solving most of the problems!

The classic steps to create a displacement map is:

• Transform it in black and white texture
• Contrast the image
• Save and apply it in the displacement channel

Ok guys, today I want to suggest one step more:

Apply the cutout filter (to reduce the color variations):

Look at the difference in the image below:

If you want to refine the displacement map you can use Gaussian blur filter. The displacement will be more soft!

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial!

1) Can you model this “angel fork”?
2) Can you animate its wings?

Take a look here >> JOB#7

1) Can you model a robot like that?
2) Can you rig this model?

Thank you for participating:
The work #6 was assigned

Why I see duplicated textures on my 3d surfaces? How to make tileable texture?

This often happens when we use picture taken from us s a texture. The best solution is to take pictures with cloudy sky. Thus light evenly spread solves the origin of the problem.

But what if we have a texture and the brightness is not uniform? Inevitably give signs of duplication .. how to solve the problem and make tileable texture?

I found here my inspiration: we use a photoshop filter called High Pass Filter! Follow the workflow shown below to understand how to arrange the levels on photoshop:

( Texture from fantastic  Mayang collection – link texture )

So, here the 3 steps to balance luminosity:

1. Duplicate the layer
2. Apply it Filters> Other > High Pass Filter (choose the right vaule in order to preserve details)
3. Assign it  ”Luminosity“

Here a little test: before (test1: NO tileable texture) and after  (test2: tileable texture) the “treatment”:

I hope this simple tutorial can help you to balace luminosity in your textures!

Basically I’m glad that vray.info or cgindia.com don’t link my posts! So just who read Cg Blog can read it. Great! (-:

Ok… I don’t like you to waste your time. Do you want to simulate the sea with V-Ray as you see in the picture above? Download the free scene – LINK! (V-Ray + 3ds 2009)

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I’m also pleased to talk a little bit of this method. I often say in my courses: there are methods and principles. Who knows the principles always find the solution, but who knows only the methods (tutorials) will have many more problems!

What is the main principle in this case? The classic “noise” is not suitable to simulate the sea because the sea has some undulations, within which there are other small ripples, within which we have very small ripples … and so on.

Now that you know this principle, create a new image in Photoshop by clicking: Filter> Render> Clouds. The result is an image like this:

It appears with large areas of black and white, within which there are smaller variations of the same. Do not you think her behavior very similar to the sea? So use this texture in “displacement” channel of the sea material and it’s done. (The value of the displacement regulates the height of the waves)

About “sea” material: It’s nothing special! Dark green (RGB = 32,61,64) with fresnel reflections: when the angle increases, increases the reflections. I putted the sun inclined to emphasize the effect.

Have a fun:

• >>> Download the free scene – LINK! (V-Ray + 3ds 2009)
• Original post – 3D Blog (Italian)