Step One finished!

[Guest]

yep, indeed...airport may get there!btw, explore layers, you can cut your coloring time way down. I colored my source1 image in about 3 hours. most of that time I spend selecting the roads and the water.Regards, nice work with the autogen btwB

[Guest]

Only thing I found that I wish was different was that the msoft texture that I allowed to show on my photo textures (027B2SU7.bmp) seems to have ended up with a different set of mips than the default, once they get to the same mip, the transition is seemless, but sometimes they'll be at different mips, then you see the transition.

[Guest]

That looks great Bob! How long did it take you? I have had the same problem with the MIPs too. My whole rectangular scenery will be at a higher detail level that the surrounding and I have to move around a little - so FS refreshes itself.

[Guest]

<>Thanks, T...about 5 hours. 3 two nights ago to get it to the stage I posted above...step 5...and 2 hours last night working with the slices. I had previously color my source photo, which takes about 3 hours over two nights.<>I'm going to bet that we can solve this, but we'll need some expert help either from Martin or Elrond....I'm hoping they'll read this and provide their opinion. At least misery loves company....I think we're just a bit on the edge of innovation, and this happens some times!By the way, have you learned how to use "Actions" in photoshop yet? They're called "scripts" in photopaint, but the same idea. Its just an automation of steps, which can be quite useful. Part of my findings from my past work on photoreal was that the resample.exe process causes enough change to the quality of the default textures that they don't look seemless, and adjustment of them in contrast in brightness, while better than nothing, was still a compromise. That's really the only thing I was working around which I devised the steps I posted. So, I'm doing the resampling with ugly placeholders for the default textures, and then redoing each slice with the actual msoft texture. This is a big area with over 100 slices, so I wrote a script that created a new layer, and pasted the msoft texture onto that layer, made a copy of the background as a new layer, and reordered the layers so I could begin to carve right away. I still had to run the script 100 times, and do the carving, but with work like this I use automation whenver possible...certainly cut my time by lots.I use another technique I should share for coloring b/w images. Again, photoshop and Corel Photopaint are similar enough that this works fine with either program. You MUST learn layers...I couldn't do anything without them. Its like not knowing how to save files on the harddrive...and starting over each time. So, assuming you read the manual and learn to use layers, then the way I color is to open the b/w image as backgroud. Add four layers (can be any number you want). I fill each layer with a different color, here you must use your artistic eye. I use two shades of brown, usually two shades of green, sometimes other layers with like yellows or whatever works. Then I'll go to each layer and bring up the properties. You'll see a scale from 1 to 256 for background value. Play with the sliders, you'll find that if you provide a bracket of say...min 160, max 180 for brown, only that level of lightness in the photo is brown. Do this with all the layers, and set transparency to suit, somewhere around 50% I find. Viola...its painted.Now I select all roads, from the b/w, and copy them directly to a top level. Then select all water for the alpha channel.Now the REAL gem! Once you've done this save it in the photoshop format, which will retain the layer structure. Then flatten, and continue under a different file name.....This is the real gem, because for your next project, you can simply change the image size of this file to match your new b/w image, and then import your new b/w image as a new layer above the orig b/w but below any colors, and your new b/w image is colored instantly. Course you'll still have to select the roads and water, and that's all I had to do with source1, the time I stated was just for that step...the colors in the image are what I use for all my work.Bob Bernstein