I want to make a normalmap from a simple 2 color image of a fruit bowl with some snakes and things, where the white areas like the fruit bowl are white in the middle and gradually shading to dark on the outside and the snakes also white in the centre and dark on the edges, but if i use blur it would make the snakes darker too fast compared to the fruit bowl because the fruit bowl is bigger.

i had a go with wavelet decompose but it's not quite the desired effect. please tell me some tips and tricks to make round greyscale forms in the middle of these images..

here is a pic to explain:

I made a video on youtube that shows how to fill with a gradient and round it off. Here is the video:



It might take a little work to make selections. You can make different layers with these filled selections and set the layers to Darken Only to make them blend in to each other as long as your working with black and white colors.

Alan

PegLeg44, I enjoyed your video, it covers an interesting technique I haven't used before

Ya, you can actually make a half rounded gradient to fill with also. Or any other gradient you decide to do if you want to get creative.

I make things and bring them into blender as a 3D object using the Displace Modifier. Lots of vidieos on youtube for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_owcNpxp ... e=youtu.be

Alan

I like that too, what 3d viewer is that your using? Blender?

I own a Carvewright carving machine and use the Designer software import viewer to view the 3D heightmap images. It's good for shallow bas relief images.

Alan

This is why I love this board. I stopped in to ask a completely unrelated question, clicked on this thread, and now I'm going to lose a few hours playing with this. Thanks for the video and technique!

You could also take an image and use the Distorts Emboss Filter on it to make it look 3D in GIMP.

On this image I made a layer and did the fill, followed by adding a layer mask to it, Emboss and then colorize. As you can see the line art layer beneith kind of adds to the overall look.

I looked up normal map on google and found that there is a filter for gimp. I guess it renders a map or tecture around 3D images.
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/

Heres another one.
http://registry.gimp.org/node/69

Very good information pegleg; never seen this one before so again, I learn something new in GIMP all the time. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Alan that is a fantastic tutorial! will be revising that alot!

this is actually one of the most useful tutorials ever for game programmers! will be sending it around!

the normalmap plugin has a 3d preview button, its abit unstable, although the references say... normal map is black for lowest area and white for highest, although it can be inversed. i think it was on inverse setting in the video.

Again thanks for the tut; added a few other things to smooth things some as well. Started out with one of my Dad's pumpkin carving patterns.

my normal maps guide sais that white is high and black is lower, and best to make the background similar shade to the edge of the bumps to have smooth bumps from background.

here is the latest normalmaps plugin for w32 with working 3d preview!!! http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap ... -1.2.3.zip

That is very nice PegLeg44. Popeye at his best. All the muscles just pop right out.

Here is the Popeye line art png image if anyone wants to play around with it.



And yes tuone I realize that a normalmap has to have a black background so all you would have to do is New Layer from Visible if you have multiple layers and then Color Invert to make the background black. You could actually switch the forground and background colors beforehand with a black background but I always like using a white background because I can see things better.

Alan

thank you PegLeg44

Hope you don't mind but I vectorized your popeye. If you use it though, don't forget to hollow the pipe.

Here is Popeye art 1) that I downloaded from google images and then 2) filling the selection area with the rounded gradient 3) colorizing portions of the gradient areas on a new layer with the selection being turned into a layer mask and 4) adding a background and some light airbrushing with grey and yellow to add a little more complexity.



Alan

PegLeg44. In your video, you said to add a new layer fill it with white, then turn off that layer. then when you used the blend tool, I noticed in the video you had that new layer turned on and it shows that you used the blend tool in the top layer, not the bottom. I did mine over and over and I ended up with black where it should be white and the colors didn't bulge. Should I have been using layer two with the selection on?

Anyway, I played around for a while and ended up with this. I don't even know how I ended up with a black background.