In case you want to edit later - change its position, align it with aother line instead of the one it was first placed with, make copies and line them up, etc. It gives you much more flexibility for editing later. If everything you do is on the same layer you can't just copy bits and pieces very easily - or change properties of certain elements. Here, this might give you some more ideas: New document. New layer (name it "boxes"), make a few boxes that are a version of gray-blue - odd shapes, maybe some overlap. New layer (name it "brushed"), and do your brushed metal excercise for the whole image covering everything underneath - but this time make the angle of the motion blur 45 degrees intead of either just up or down. Now hold the Alt key down as you click on the line between "boxes" and "brushed" - as your cursor goes over the line you'll see it change, letting you know you're in the correct area for you to do this. You've just conected (locked) one layer to another - whatever is on the upper layer (brushed) will only affect what it is connected to. You've also made them separate so that you can change the color of the boxes layer to a lighter blue (Ctrl+U), and then change the "brushed" layer mode to Soft Light (instead of Normal). More fun - apply a bevel and emboss layer effect (at the bottom of the layers palette its the circle with the italicizes F) to "boxes" - try pillow emboss as well and see what you like. Better yet - click on the "brushed" layer to make sure it's active, then Ctrl+T - right-click and choose "Flip Horizontal" - bet you were wondering why I had you make the brushed metal at an angle, instead of straight up and down, right? Now click on "brushed" to make it active, and at the bottom of the layers palette click the circle that is split B&W and choose "levels" - slide the far left up arrow far to the right, and the far right far to the left to make it really contrasty. This make an adjustment to whatever is below it (doesn't jave to be the top layer) without ACTUALLY altering anything below - IN CASE YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT LATER. NOW hold Alt and click on the line between brushed and your new Levels layer - you've just made only the brushed layer more contrasty. Double click on the Adjustment Layer to open it and change the sliders around until you like it. You can make several sets of layer like this and build up the brushed metal plating of your dreams - or use other filters and combinations to make changes. Have fun- -Lew ;-)

6 - tough choice!

That's been my worry - if I give specific instructions, it'll be like a paint-by-numbers and you wouldn't know WHY you were doing what you were doing - so if you wanted to make changes you'd still be lost and frustrated.

Sorry - AFTER you draw the lines, flatten and save as your bump map - THEN make it copper for the color and add your copper image. Also, don't make the boxes all square - vary the sizes, long, wide, make them all different.

Diagonal lines - in PS, create a new layer, and hit "U" to get to the proper tool set - it may come up as the rectangle tool first - click and hold to see the rest of the tools under that button and you'll see the Line tool - Bingo! At the top you can set the line width, and at the far left, you can see the 2nd section of icons has 3 "boxes" - click the one on the right to "fill pixels". When you hold the Shift key down, you can drag straight up and down, as well as perfect 45 degree angled lines. As far as bump maps, try this excercise (I know, yet ANOTHER excercise...) where you just make a grey square picture (just 512x512) and save it as your "color" image, and then draw white lines, or fill white boxes, and then black lines, and black boxes - save this as your "bump" image. This way you have NO texture in the general color - everything is created by the bump map so you don't have to distinguish what's what. Apply that to a sphere or box and see what it does. You canmake any texture you want just by using different shades of grey, and on the extreme end blacks and whites. If you just turned you copper image above into grayscale and used that it would be far too lumpy and more resemble rust than brushed steel so you'd have to lower the contrast a LOT. Just changing the color image to B&UW is the quickie method, but not necessarily realistic. Actual plates that are copper: (just an idea for you) Try creating an image that is just a truckload of lighter and darker boxes overlapping (make them on different layers) and change their opacity so they even overlap visually. If you just wanna be fast, flatten and save as your bump, then turn it into a copper color. Draw the lines like you want - go nuts with it. Take your brushed copper above and lay it on the top layer (Ctrl+T - stretch it to fit) and change the mode to "Soft Light" so it'll look like brushed copper plates. You can always just apply this to see how it's going to work, and change it/do it differently if you don't like the results - but hopefully you'll have a better understanding of how you can create textures in PS. See how that works for you - I know you're frustrated. I'm kind of caught between giving you exact directions and pointing you in the right direction because I know you want to come up with this on your own (to make it YOUR texture and not someone else's), so maybe this will be a better "point" perhaps? Good luck and happy experimenting- -Lew ;-)

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1039876&Start=1&Artist=thundering1&ByArtist=Yes The above link is the final version of this image I made in Bryce. More often than not, I like to finish textures, shinyness, reflections, etc. in Photoshop. I like creating textures, then applying them, but Bryce sometimes takes entirely too long to render with complex lighting (sometimes more than a few DAYS!!). Maybe you could just make your render with the lighting you like, but just "color" the walls to the colors you eventually want them to be, and take care of the rest in PS. And Tantarus is absolutely right - PS has a fairly steep learning curve, and making realistic textures can get complicated - especially if you don't have a really good understanding of creating the bump maps that go with them. Textures by themselves are flat, but when you apply a good bump map, it bounces off the lighting and gives it "depth" that you can't conveniently achieve another way. This may sound dumb becasue of what you wanna do right now, but go out and get a couple of Scott Kelby's books on PS. There's some really good excercises that most don't have anything to do with creating what you specifically want, but they'll definitely get you good ideas of HOW you CAN do what you want. Good luck- -Lew ;-)

I'm working on a few Photoshop tutorials to load up on R'osity since there's a lot of questions for them, and you're right - there aren't many Photoshop tuts here at all. And just for things to make sense, go here - www.rochr.com and go the the Tutorials section (this guy should be bronzed! his stuff is absolutely awesome!). Click on Photographic Textures" and he shows you how to apply textures like the ones above. Save the images above, and do them to a simple square or sphere and you should get what I'm talking about. So, in the long term, keep watching the tutorials section and hopefully I'll have something you can use. -Lew ;-)

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1056987&Start=1&Artist=thundering1&ByArtist=Yes If the image in this link is an example of what you're looking for: Selected the area below the ships, copied to their own layer (Ctrl+J) Applied a HEAVY Ocean Ripple filter - I may have even done a Poster Edges filter after that - then changed the layer mode to Overlay. Played with Levels (Ctrl+L) a bit until is was darker, richer, but clipped the blacks so you can see detals underneath. Masked (or you can Erase) it for soft edges like the air is evening out. Hope that helps.

Load up the image (small, of course - like no bigger than 800x800) in this thread and I'll see what I can come up with for you. Not entirely sure how it's being applied, so at this point I'm not sure I can give you an answer you're looking for.

Live in USA - My family got it for me for my birthday so I have no idea of the actual cost but they said it was very reasonable. I have a feeling it was less than $50 - it's more than that on the site, but that's in Australian currency and the exchange was less - or so I gathered. Cool book BTW!!!

In doing outdoor portrait photography, I always try to either match (or exceed by 1 stop) the ambient light with a diffused strobe. You get the color of the sky (not blown out), and everything comes out nice and rich. It doesn't end up being too contrasty, and some contrast is actually a good thing or it will look "bland". While I happen to have battery powered units, you can use a regular on-camera flash (put it off-camera on a stand to get a more portrait look) shot through tracing paper to diffuse it. Grab your camera, flash, a stand, some tracing paper, and some friends - experiment for a bit and find out what works for you. Work on positioning, work on lighting, find what feels comfortable. Tell them not to wear anything white as it blows out in digital (don't know if you're using film or digital - just taking a chance there). Tell them not to wear any clothing with heavy patterns or very bright colors - it'll detract from their personality in the final image. As a nice touch, they could wear "like" clothing that is relaxed like jeans and all roughly the same color shirts. They can have different style shirts, but it'll still come across as unified. Side note - each stop up or down is double or half the amount (measurement) of light you give the exposure - hence "squared". Good luck and have fun.

And here is the bump map. Realize that the black lines are what's gonna make the bricks stick out. You tend to not have a bright white as your raised texture because it doesn't leave much room for subtle lumps and scratches kinda stuff - and when you get this into Bryce (saw that most of your stuff was Bryce - love that program!) you can raise/lower the bump height. I tend to not put highlights and shadows in my texture colormap because that's what the bump map is for You can make your textures from scratch using filters and blending layers, use manipulated photos, combination of both, whatever. There are plenty of "metal" tutorials, or you can grab a digital camera and shoot metal plates - and you can add "plates" to your bump map (that arean't in the picture you took) by merely using the rectangular marquee tool and raising the levels of the selected area. And side note: try to take your pictures (if that's your route) on an overcast day so you don't get highlights and shadows built into your colormap that won't look right if you're using created light on, say, the inside of a ship. I know that was long - sorry, but I hope that helps. Good luck- -Lew

Basic premise for textures, and this should give you ideas, is that you need a color map, and a bump map - sorry, but I can't tell if you understood that part from this thread. The color map is just that - a color picture of the texture you want, like the ones above in the thread (those are pretty cool, BTW guys!). Then you need a bump map that is greyscale - the lighter the color, the more it protrudes "out", the darker, the more ir recedes. While the examples I'm attaching are not what metal, they should show you what you need to do for YOUR purposes. Here is the color map:

Figured it out! Went to check that my fav was still the same number - YES, I'm a dolt! At the bottom of each image - sorry!

Hi there! New to Renderosity, and I feel pretty dumb asking this, but I can't seem to find the place to actually "vote". I've found the place where there's a tally of what HAS been voted for, and the contest itself is all over the place - but I can't figure out how to vote. Is it somewhere on the main contest page I kept missing? I haven't found it in the forums yet, either. If you could please point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. Thanks- -Lew ;-)