transfer a shading

[doonee]

ah yes, racc ...
messing with the DEM itself also comes into play in this case, because the curse of the rivers is incorrect. Either the rivers changed course, which is possible, or the pointweighting of the DEM is too unprecise to guarantee an even depression of the riverbeds.
In any case, either I have to convert the DEM into RAW, load that into PS and try to create some kind of mask form the rivers in the overlay to apply that to the DEM, or the whole thing has to go through a heightfield editor (Leveller etc.) somehow (shudder).


d

[Racc Iria]

Doonee...

I thought the DEM rendering with the new surface draped over it looked pretty good. The rivers didn't seem that out of place, either. But, you are more familiar with them than I am. You can also get a little more shading in Terragen by changing the sun angle and position so it will cast deeper shadows. Maybe then you wouldn't need the "extra" subtle shading.

doonee said:
i googled, and found ctrl+alt+~ for PC, but that creates and error here,
maybe due to the portuguese keyboard (~ in portuguese is a 2stroke char).

Another way to get the luminosity selection without using the ~... Go to the channels palette and Control+Click on the RGB channel. You'll see some marching ants in the image. From there, just save the selection and you'll have the luminosity information stored in an alpha channel that you can then cut and paste or edit in the normal ways.

--Racc

[doonee]

racc

here are some quick detail renders ...
1 the rivers ... (i exagerated height a bit, to make the point clearer)
2 when you get too close (to a 15m/pixel picture)
3 getting closer after having exchanged the texture (to a 1m/pixel picture)

Terragen is pretty lousy for straight 100% overlays, because it streches the pixels in the foreground way too much. When you try to maintain distance in order to avoid that effect, you usually run out of sky or horizon. A way to avoid that is to create several bw mask-overlays, but somehow i find that very worksome (and a bit unprecise). Another way is to plan for HUGE renders with extra foreground and then crop some of that for the final. All in all my TG expert buddys have all recommended me to stay away from trying single overlays in TG. You just loose too much detail.

rgds
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PS
btw, i think i made a mistake earlier on:
i wrote that the first render above was B (new texture) draped over then DEM, but of course it was not.
It was A (old, original texture), of course
I went back and edited the post to save other readers from confusion.

[doonee]

Another way to get the luminosity selection without using the ~...

cool !! )
thanks racc!

[Racc Iria]

You're quite welcome.

In your examples above... #3 looked pretty good to me.

--Racc

[doonee]

racc
Yes.
Ideally, light and dark material is added here and there to 'enhance' the pic.
When trying to do this for a larger region, i figured it'd be handy to know how to steal the shading from an entire area.

rgds
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[Racc Iria]

Did lowering the sun closer to the horizon help any with the shading?

--Racc

[doonee]

Ah, ok, thats what youre asking ...

These renders are not Terragen renders, theyre done with the 3D function of 'Globalmapper', a DEM translation and interpolation tool. Sorry for not mentioning that....

I dont think that Terragen is very usefull (sadly) for this particular kind of thing (see my other comments about TG above), although of course it has dozens of other virtues (one of which is rendering sunlight and sky).

Ive been playing around with Vue for 3D shaded overlays, and a bunch of other geographical apps as well, but I guess I yet have to find the app best suited for this.
I guess you have an opinion of how you`d tackle this with Max ? ...

Globalmapper with its 'box style' represents the easy route of ignoring the foreground area where pixels would appear as 'hypertstreched', as well the 'horizon-problem' which occurs at lower angles.
No sunlight, no sky, no horizon, no foreground, but 'it works'.
Then again, with Globalmapper, although there is hillshading of DEMS, there is no shading of overlays, which makes 'shadowstealing' a very important detail.

[Racc Iria]

Okay, that clears up a lot for me.

Ive been playing around with Vue for 3D shaded overlays, and a bunch of other geographical apps as well, but I guess I yet have to find the app best suited for this.
I guess you have an opinion of how you`d tackle this with Max ? ...

Not much more than what we talked about early on.

I do recall a plugin for Max called Dreamscape that would create an environment. Land, sea, atmosphere, sun based lighting, etc. I think I remember it having an option to use your own images to create the land mesh or it would randomize it. But, I'm not certain. I only got to play with a demo of it for a few days a long while ago.

Just did a Google search for a link and found this:
http://www.afterworks.com/DreamScape.asp?ID=6

As it turns out, you can edit DEM or Terragen images directly inside this thing. I may have to get this myself.

--Racc

[Flora]

Hi doonee,

Originally Posted by doonee

i googled, and found ctrl+alt+~ for PC, but that creates and error here,
maybe due to the portuguese keyboard (~ in portuguese is a 2stroke char).

I have an Italian Keyboard and had a similar problem... To select luminosity directly from the Layers the combinations that work with my keyboard are:

Ctrl+Alt+1
Ctrl+Alt+2
Ctrl+Alt+3

In alternative, in the Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages, I added a few languages to my keyboard settings and checked the option to show an additional language bar icon in my taskbar ... This way, whenever I open Photoshop, I change my keyboard language to English (USA) and work with that ... mind you, it took me a bit to remember where all the keys were exactly, but, now, it is automatic ...

[doonee]

you can edit DEM or Terragen images directly inside this thing. I may have to get this myself.

hmm, that looks quite promissing indeed.
an ocean of options ...

thanks racc

-EDIT-
i couldnt find examples for single drape-style overlays in their gallery ..
did you see any ?

[doonee]

@flora

To select luminosity directly from the Layers ....

Great Flora, that works here too.
(Layers appear to have to be named Layer 1, Layer 2, etc. for it to work).

In alternative, in the Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages,

Yep, i know, i have done that on my laptop. I guess youre right, it doesnt hurt to do that on this machine (which is bought here) as well ....
(Altho sometimes all this alt+shift back and forth stuff drives me nuts...)

thank you for the great tips !!
ciao ciao
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[Racc Iria]

i couldnt find examples for single drape-style overlays in their gallery ..
did you see any ?

From what I read on the site, they have a special material type so you can have the material automatically change with slope/height. However, there's no law saying you have to use their material. You could let the plugin create the mesh for the landscape, then apply your own material to it.

If you assign UVW planer mapping coordinates to the mesh, and then use your own image in the diffuse map slot of a material, that image will be projected straight down onto the surface of the mesh.

--Racc

[doonee]

racc
yep, sure
what i tried to say was that the use of a single sat-image draped over the entire terrain isnt really the scope of apps like max, vue & Co. There, users go about texturing the terrain in more detailed ways, using max-UVW, distribution maps, vue-ecosystems etc. etc.
Using a single bmp fto texture the whole thing doesnt make use of all these features and gives very varying results, because thats not so much what they expect their users to do.
Thats why i was left curious whether they had an example somewhere using a terrain textured by a single big image. I guess i have to try myself to find out.

rgds
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[doonee]

(not so very related to this shading-thread ...)
another river test, showing that these riverbeds still need some editing.

rgds
d