Aureeanna opened this issue on Mar 14, 2005 ยท 5 posts
hauksdottir posted Tue, 15 March 2005 at 11:13 PM
You notice that the pattern looks like splashes slopping outward, yet within "cells"? And that the pattern appears to be basically 2 colors: light golden and dark reddish brown? It is also translucent... so that a material with this look should also let some light through. If I were doing this, I'd look at the cell shape and open a new window in PhotoShop and draw a nice grid of roughly this shape (being a natural material, it doesn't need to be perfect). Then I'd "offset" it (menu item under "other filters" IIRC) and line up the seams so that it would tile. Offsetting shifts everything, so that the edges wrap around and meet up, and it is easy to easy what needs nudging to go back in line. Once the frame of cells is made and tileable, make another layer on top of it and fill it with clear golden brown. Being me, I'd probably add monochromatic "noise" and "select"ing each area streak it out a bit using "motion blur". This would be subtle, but add some detail. Add another layer, at perhaps 50% opacity. The blend mode would be multiply since I would want the darker color to have prominence. Then I'd "select" an area, add a spot of dark brown to its bottom corner with the paintbrush tool, and then "liquify" it so that I could push it around and up&out like those splashes. Being "selected", the action should only affect what is inside that cell, and not the neighbors. Once I go that cell looking right, I'd go to the next one, working my way through all of them. Then "offset" again to fix the edge. Once the tile is made, you just "save" it off with layers so that you can go back and tweak. Then "save for web" as a .jpg, which will flatten the layers and put it in a format Poser knows. Open Poser and apply the material to something to see how it looks... setting it with a bit of transparency or transclucence depending upon which version of Poser you have. You should be able to adjust its scale or the number of times it tiles depending upon what you are applying it too (how the object is mapped). If you have Painter, or a vector-based program such as Illustrator, your method for getting the splashing effect would be different and perhaps more natural. Carolly