Mountains out of Molehills by shrinkers
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Description
I wanted to share a technique that I've been using to get backgrounds and surfaces to look very three-dimensional. I bet a lot of you already know this, but it could be helpful for those who don't.
I use DAZ|Studio, but I'm certain the technique will work in Poser as well.
Here are three renders. What I did was create a plane, and then got a photograph of gravel to use as a surface texture. For the three renders, I used identical lighting and the identical camera angle.
For the second and the third render, I also used the same photograph as a bump map and as a displacement map. I then dialed up the bump strength and displacement strength to 400%. For the middle render, I set positive bump at 2, and maximum displacement at 2. For the bottom render, positive bump and maximum displacement were both set at 10.
You see the results. The gravel comes alive, and sticks out of the surface. You can do this to make long grass, or thick-plush carpets, or to create cracks in the fingernails of a monster (look at the full-sized version of "Beast and the Beauty"), or deep creases in the leathery skin of a dragon ("No Fear of Flying"), or bas- relief on wall carvings (I did this on my "Waiting for the Go Order" render.)
For background images, I seldom set a photo as a background. Instead, I'll use the same technique, putting a photo as a texture on a plane, and putting the plane behind my foreground scene, and sizing it appropriately. This lets me make the background look more real, more textured, more three-dimensional. I did this for the background of my "Riders 2: War" render.
I hope some of you find this idea useful!
Comments (8)
giulband
Very very interesting series !!!!!!!!
Cyve
I agree... It's excelent !
Richardphotos
your results are outstanding. I may give it a try in poser one day
Greywolf44
So many people here could really use this technique to enhance their work. Background textures and textures in general take up computer resources and add to render time which I fear is the major factor in why they don't use this procedure. I personally couldn't get along without my displacement maps. Thanks for sharing this with viewers.
eekdog
they do pop out at you.
brewgirlca
Ha, from the title I expected to see something like a cjoe image where some gal gets her boobs hugely inflated... just the way my twisted mind works. This is real genius, I love the effects you show here. You turn a pebble beach onto Bryce Canyon! I crank up the bump maps in the material room on almost every image. I think vendors are very conservative on their texture depths... but that's ok by me because I know how to fix them and I think it helps give my renders a certain stylistic look. But I never thought of applying the bump technique to a background photo. Now that is a stroke of innovation. Thanks for showing us the way.
UteBigSmile
Thank's for sharing this!
iborg64
thats a useful idea looks good