Adding a bit of extra depth to blurry images and boring Planet / Ship renders.

[Frazzer.]

Greetings everyone!

I've recently been thinking about having a bit of extra kick in some of my renders / pictures, whatever. This is a tutorial mainly for those interested. It should take you about 5 minutes at most and is very effective!

Apparantly this plugin is needed to make it work, thanks to Evangelist! http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photosh...ds_plugins.html
First of all open your picture in Photoshop. Note that I will not cover any other image editing programs in this tutorial since I have no idea how it works / if it works in any other programs.
So, you should have your picture set, I've chosen a stock ship render for this tutorial. Your screen should look like this now.

<strike>Next step is to either save this image as .jpeg if it's .png format or just continue from here.</strike> Create a new layer as a copy of the original image.

Select the new layer and go to "Filters -> NVIDIA Tools -> NormalMap Filter..." Click it and this window should appear. You can ignore most of these settings and go straight to the ones we will change. First is 'Scale' in "Height Generation". This will add the desired depth to the image. You should keep this at 10, I've experienced this as the best setting.
Second is 'Filter Type' also in "Height Generation", set this to 'Du/Dv'.
Next set "Height Source" to 'Average RGB' and "Alpha field" to 'Unchanged for .png and to 'Height' for .jpeg format.

Apply it.

You will notice that it has this colourful line effect, and we want to get rid of that. <strike>Go to "Image -> Mode -> Greyscale". This will remove all the colours from the picture, if you get a warning simply click 'Delete'. This is necessary to make the end result look good. After you've done that save the picture as for example "your.ship_normal.jpeg".</strike> Hit Ctrl + Shift + U to desaturate the layer.

Now open the <strike>stock picture</strike> normal ship render layer from the beginning and <strike>paste the normal map render over it like this.
Now we will</strike> apply a 'Blending Mode'. Select "Linear Light" from the dropdown box menu. And the end result should look like this.

I hope this helps you, all credit goes to me. If you have any questions regarding this post here or contact me on Skype.

Here is an examples of a planet, before AND after.

Before:


and after:



Note: For planets you can use something higher, like 25. Just play around with it. ;)
I'm sorry for all spelling errors and ununderstandable (is that even a word? :rolleyes:) parts, english is not my first language.

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[Evan_]

Niiice...! I've never explored around there... Ehh, the event-server can wait...

EDIT: And I want a monitor of that size! :$

EDIT EDIT: Apparently it needs plugin. That one. Works fine.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Click-saving project: Duplicate the image by Ctrl+J, than you don't have to position the two. And after the filter is applied you can desaturate it with Ctrl+Shift+U

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[Tenacity]

Since you're only covering photoshop, here's how to get a very similar effect using GIMP 2.6. There may be a plugin like the on you used, but as I dont have anything similar, I just used an emboss effect.

1. Take your render and duplicate the image (so you have two layers of the same image).

2. Apply an emboss effect (Filters -> Distorts -> Emboss) to the top layer.

3. Here's a picture of the image after being embossed.

4. Change the top layer from "normal" to "multiply" or "burn" (will give different effects based on which one you go with).

5. Alter the transparency of the embossed/multiplied layer until it applies the amount of texture to the ship that you want.

You can also use the invert colors ('negative') effect to swap the texturing from 'sticking out' to 'sinking in', play around with it until you get the desired look.

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[Frazzer.]

I was sure that no plugin was needed. Stupid me. :rolleyes:I'll put it in the tutorial.

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