Mountain Maker?

Hi ^^

So the thread about sculpted mountains made me wonder.

Aside from the costly full featured modellers and blender, are there any sculpty making programs that would allow you to make a non-symmtrical sculpted mountain?

And if so with things like sculptypaint and such, is there any tutorial on doing something like it?

upon watching a wings3d tut on making a sculpty blimp, it seems it would work pretty well for this. Would I be correct in that assumption?

You don't need any 3d program to make a mountain.

Take the attached sculpt map, which is just a flat plane, into any paint program that lets you edit channels. You'll notice the blue channel is a flat color - thats the height. You'll leave the other two channels alone.

So now you can just paint a mountain on the blue channel. Black is the lowest elevation, while white would be the peak of the mountain. So you can paint the border black, and then mess around with the rest. You can try a common "render clouds" or "fractal noise" filter to generate a random mountain to get you started

Of course you can also have fun with the magnet commands in Wings to make mountains too...

Sounds awesome..only trouble is umm... Iono how to do that lol.. I have photoshop elements..and.. iono how to edit channels with it, just layers o.o

If Elements won't edit channels, just make a greyscale image, and paint on that.

Then you can take it into hmap2sculpty
http://www.metaversesolutions.com/products.php

Ill try that.. I have a feeling I'll be back with problems I cause lol.. but thankies much ^^

woot first q! OK..this bis for wings3d.. I've downloaded the l\plugin to export for SL twice now, and installed properly I think..but I cant export to SL or see anything that has to do with SL

Using height maps.. iono how to do it in wings yet...

But I made this by doing a black and white height map and the program you told me about, DF Thanks ^^

Took me maybe two minutes...mostly just outline and fill and such, but some detailing, followed by a 'blur more' filter, then shove it into the hm2sculpt and tada ^^

Textured withthe library heavymoss texture, as i cant get on my normal av atm. Texture repeat is 5 and 5, sculpty size is 10x10x10

ok..new qusion!!!

How to I get the awesome texture baking done, without a 3d moddeller or something expensive like that? I can make a general texture, but without making it specifically for each mountain itt'll look odd...I think

well you can just take the heightmap you made as a layer and make it partially transparent and use it as a guide to paint your texture

as for baking lighting, you'd have to take it into a 3d program. There's no way to do that without one ... yet

ill let windlight do lighting for now lol.. and thanks ^^

You can kind of fake 3d lighting using Emboss on the height map. Photoshop has Lighting Effects, which is *still* notorious for crashing from what I've heard (to this day, Lighting Effects crashing me like crazy so I avoid it).

And I recommend actually using Sculpt Type Plane just in case. I've seen some beautiful work get mangled because of non-plane mountainish sculpties.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PRIM_TYPE_SCULPT

If you do use Plane, take note that working with 16x16 LOD is a bit different.

Really? I've never ever had that happen, and I've never heard of it happening to anyone else either. I don't want to derail the thread by dwelling on this, but since this allegedly "notorious" problem is a new one on me, can you steer me towards any forum or informational site where people have talked about it?

I just tried Googling for "Photoshop lighting crash". All I found that seemed like it MIGHT be kind of sort of relevant was an article from 2001, talking about how a 3rd party lighting engine written for PS on the PC would crash on a Mac if it were used to make too many changes too quickly. There was nothing relevant about the built-in lighting effects. So then I tried searching the Adobe forums. Nothing. I also searched Photoshopforums.com. Again, nothing. So how "notorious" can this really be?

I used to visit Adobe's own U2U forums and it came up quite a bit while I was a regular there. I've heard of Lighting Effects crashing on other forums *very* rarely. Bear in mind that I haven't been to U2U in around 3 years. But that's what I remember.

For me, Lighting Effects crashes quite a bit. Like every fifth time I run it. Real crap shoot. Always been like that since it appeared* no matter what machine I run it on. Maybe it's me. I don't know.

* I've been using PS since 2.5, and they tend to blend together after a few decades. I honestly can't tell you how long Lighting Effects has been in Photoshop.