Painting a Terrain with Photoshop as a Poor Man

Started by WAS, October 31, 2018, 06:16:40 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

WAS

Has anyone with a lack of funds or heightfield generation software ever attempted it via Photoshop?

I don't have access to World Machine or World Creator, so wanted to give it a go. Curious if anyone else has attempted it.

See, I figure, I could start with cloud noise in Photoshop and use the Burn and Dodge tools to paint the terrain scaling, and do whatever else I wanted in there for base shape. Terragen than provides me a nice Erode v3 and Erode Smooth, and even further Daniil's amazing Classic Erosion or Proc Erosion to bring it further life.

Now I'm heading to the drawing board...

digitalguru

#1
I'd say it's possible, though a little long winded go back and forth between Photoshop and Terragen as you build up a terrain. Dannis plug-in is excellent though, and if you give it enough detail to erode, should make some nice natural results.

I'd definitely suggest creating a file and painting in 32 bit float, even though the toolset reduces drastically in 32bit mode - and save to Open Exr.

Adobes Open Exr plugin is crap though (at least it is in my Photoshop CS6) so grab a plug-in called EXR-IO, which is heaps better and free:

https://www.exr-io.com/

p.s have you tried Blender?, I don't use it, but it looks like you can sculpt geometry and bake out to a displacement map:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1161/how-to-make-a-displacement-map-from-existing-3d-geometry

WAS

I have been trying to work with blender for a couple years but just not too keen on it's UI and methodology of macros as a default teaching approach as apposed to more appropriate documentation where everything is the long way about with macros being a simple reference page lol

WAS

Spent some time after a power outage to try a TIFF export at 16bit, the results for wildly just burning and dodging the heightmap are pretty nice actually.

Dune

Try painting a vector displacement map. Nice challenge. I did a few.

WAS

I've been looking at vector maps and trying to figure out the relation between channel offsets and displacements