Layer Styles
thedenrei posted in Uncategorized on July 5th, 2006
Having learned quite a bit from doing the planet and logo, I decided to try going back to some of my textures for the town. The biggest thing I’ve taken away is the power of layer styles (ie. when you double click on a layer and it brings up that little window with 1000 cryptic options…). I had known of them before, but thought they were mostly for doing noobish winamp skins and such.
This is based off a file I had been working on eariler, and was really not turning out. The picture on the left is without layer styling and on the right two have it turned on. The bread and butter are the “shadow” and “glow” options, and doing some fancy things with the quality contour curves (by that I mean choosing a non default one). I’ve used drop shadow to highlight the nooks and crannies. The curved line things are actually a single color, but by setting the quality contour curve to look like “/\/\” two hills, you get new and distinct lines, the color of which you can set. Also, for the glow options, I’ve set some noise, giving a bit of grain. The vertically curved lines still dont look good. Its too dense at the moment and could probably use a bit more blending into the wood below.
One “unknown” for me is how much detail to put into the color map, and how much to rely on other in-engine shading. Our engine supports normal and specularity maps at the moment. For example, here there are horizontal nooks (and crannies) which I’ve colored darkly, and highlighted with yellowishness. Should I instead leave the darkening completely to the normal map and the highlighting to the specularity map? I feel like I should leave at least a little bit of that information in the color map, from past experimentation. If you were to shine a light directly onto the surface (eliminating any direct shadows) the nooks would still be darker, even though the wood there has the same value as everywhere else. Is this what “occlusion maps” are for…? I guess I’ll just have to wait to get a more complete toolset from Chris (which is coming along very well) so I can just see how it looks and work intuitively.
I’m so good at renting movies. Since coming to school here in Madison, I tend to rent only when I’m not hanging out with anyone, so my picks are 100% my own taste. and I’m always rediculously satisfied with what I get. This time I got a whopping 4 titles: Ninja Scroll, Appleseed, Love Actually and Memoirs of a Geisha. Ninja Scroll I’d seen many years ago, so thats kind of cheating. And its really violent. My project in sculpture class turned out horribly. Been spending all my creative energy here, I guess. Whatever.
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