Celestia Forums

Here I will answer any and all questions pertaining to Photoshop and how to make seamless, impressive planet textures...with the help of GIMP of course...but thats Fridgers area so Photoshop only please

Heres my first tip of the day...An easy way to manipulate a small part of a texture is to copy it into a new layer and change it there...That way you dont mess up your work...It also comes in handy making glow effects around an object...Using Gauss blur and multiple layers of the same object...you can make the object appear to blend with the background...

Sorry for this stupid question, but where can I find readable tutorials about making textures with photoshop? I'm a graphic newbie. So please only beginner tutorials :D

Greetz, Matze

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to that question...There all over the web...

Heres a few nice tutorial websites related to the various tools and what not...

http://www.awakemm.com/poserarcana/tutorials/index.html

http://www.absolutecross.com/tutorials/photoshop/

http://www.neofrog.com/tutorials.html

As for planet texture tutorials...I havent found any decent ones yet...

hello rass, hem did you know if there is a way to make images that are more than 30000 pixels large with photoshop ??? i'm always stop to this resolution... not easy for the ultra high res ;p

byye

nice new board, hihi

Its possible I suspect with enough RAM...Try setting up a RAM disk when having 1-5 gigs of memory...Make it a gig and make photoshops scratch disk this...Might be possible then...

I currently have only 384megs so this is all theroy...but its worth a shot...

Also having a high video memory is most important...for that I would be looking at 128megs at the very minimum...

Hi !
I got problems with photoshop :

I have a nice earth surface texture.
I also have a 2 colors earth texture :
White for the oceans, Black for the lands

I wanted to put the two colors image as an alpha channel of the first one. How can I do that? I use Photoshop 6 under XP.
Will this alpha channel will be interpreted as a specular filter of the new texture by Celestia?
Other question :

Why can't I save an image with an alpha channel on a PNG format file. I'v red that' png does not support alpha channel ...

What format can I use compatible with Photoshop AND Celestia AND Alpha Channel

thanx

Poor little Newbie BumpySpec(tac)ular

http://www.thesprayshop.net/tutorials/t ... lpha.shtml
You can save as PNG, it does support an alpha channel.

Ortolan wrote:http://www.thesprayshop.net/tutorials/t ... lpha.shtml
You can save as PNG, it does support an alpha channel.

Ok for that tutorial, thats pretty cool !
But it talks about Tif format. And I think Celestia doesn't supprt it.. I'm I wrong ?
And when I do this and save my file in a PNG format, all the indications about Alpha Channel on the "Save file" message box are DISABLED !! (

Poor poor PLN

Photoshop only supports a transparency alpha 1 channel...It doesnt support the specular alpha 0 however...If you have intentions of developing spec PNG files...Use the GIMP...

http://www.gimp.org

Good luck...

Rassilon wrote:Photoshop only supports a transparency alpha 1 channel...It doesnt support the specular alpha 0 however...If you have intentions of developing spec PNG files...Use the GIMP...

http://www.gimp.org

Good luck...

Thank you !
I didn't knew about that story of alpha "0" alpha "1"....
I thought there was ONE and only ONE alpha channel.
I was wondering how it was interpreted by Celestia to make the alpha channel transparancy or specular...
So Celestia is less "magic" than I thought

Why bumpmapping doesn't work on Celestia ???
When that outrageous problem will be fix ?

Exigent PLN !

I have made DDS textures with specularity with PhotoShop and the DDS plugin. I did not know anything about different kinds of alpha channels and just put a b/w spec map there, and it works.

Bump maps do work, but only in combination with smaller textures (width<2k?) and not in combination with specular reflections...

Buzz wrote:I have made DDS textures with specularity with PhotoShop and the DDS plugin. I did not know anything about different kinds of alpha channels and just put a b/w spec map there, and it works.

Bump maps do work, but only in combination with smaller textures (width<2k?) and not in combination with specular reflections...

Very interesting....
Were can I get that DDS plugin ?

I think your wrong for the rest :
Look at the related links of the Celestia site.
The first one where there is Fridger's Earth Pictures :
"The earth texture with combined bumpmapping and specular reflection has 8192 x 8192 resolution and as 4:1 packed DXT3 file (including an 8 bit alpha channel) is 44.7 MB long."
I don't understand a single word of these but have a look to his pictures...
There's bump mapping, specularity, and huge resolution.
So he did it....
Again : Congratulation Fridger. It's wonderfull.


PLN
Poor Little Newbie

PLN's lost wrote:

Buzz wrote:I have made DDS textures with specularity with PhotoShop and the DDS plugin. I did not know anything about different kinds of alpha channels and just put a b/w spec map there, and it works.

Bump maps do work, but only in combination with smaller textures (width<2k?) and not in combination with specular reflections...

Very interesting....
Were can I get that DDS plugin ?

I think your wrong for the rest :
Look at the related links of the Celestia site.
The first one where there is Fridger's Earth Pictures :
"The earth texture with combined bumpmapping and specular reflection has 8192 x 8192 resolution and as 4:1 packed DXT3 file (including an 8 bit alpha channel) is 44.7 MB long."
I don't understand a single word of these but have a look to his pictures...
There's bump mapping, specularity, and huge resolution.
So he did it....
Again : Congratulation Fridger. It's wonderfull. :D


PLN
Poor Little Newbie

There is a small confusion going on here: Buzz' statement of maximal bumpmap size = 2k refers to "dynamical" bumpmapping by means of an external bumpmap file assigned in solarsys.ssc. The advantage is that the bump shadows then vary with the position of the illumination source (e.g. the sun).

I have been using "static" bumpmapping via GIMP. That also works with very high resolution, but assumes a /fixed angle of incidence/ of the illumination!

There is nothing for free in life;-)

Static bumpmapping is still /much/ superior to /NO/ bumpmapping, as most of you could see;-)

The dds photoshop plugin you find at the NVIDIA developers site, where also the less fancy nvdxt_tools are, that most people without photoshop are using to convert to dds format.

Bye Fridger

Ok on the subject of alpha 0 heres a past post which contains that info and why it doesnt show up in windows for that matter...Also unless there is a plugin...Photoshop does not support alpha channels with PNG files...It will load them as a transparency channel only...Also I think this may be contributed by windows unability to see alpha 0...But it seems that there is no way to alpha out the black even to make transparency maps of the clouds...GIMP seems to be the only solution...Now as far as the DDS plugin...That I will have to give a whirl again...as I am now using 98SE again instead of XP

Heres the historic link: http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=455&highlight=alpha

btw, if there are any of you photoshoppers out there who want to contribute to this forum...feel free...as I wish to learn as much as possible

Rassilon wrote:Ok on the subject of alpha 0 heres a past post which contains that info and why it doesnt show up in windows for that matter...Also unless there is a plugin...Photoshop does not support alpha channels with PNG files...It will load them as a transparency channel only...Also I think this may be contributed by windows unability to see alpha 0...But it seems that there is no way to alpha out the black even to make transparency maps of the clouds...GIMP seems to be the only solution...Now as far as the DDS plugin...That I will have to give a whirl again...as I am now using 98SE again instead of XP :)

Heres the historic link: http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=455&highlight=alpha

btw, if there are any of you photoshoppers out there who want to contribute to this forum...feel free...as I wish to learn as much as possible ;)

Would a MacOS9 or OSX with photoshop6 work better? If not I have Mandrake8.2 aswell with TheGimp on that (its alot better in linux then windows I can tell you that much)...

On an unrelated note: Hey rass! :D

Glad you could make it bubba ...Did you ever get that texture to work out?

Ok new tip of the day...When making earth-like planets...Make a new canvas arouns 1024 x 512 or higher if you wish...Set the color scheme on your palette to B&W by pressing 'D' and then Filters > Render > clouds...then do a difference clouds several times or until you have the pattern you want...Next set contrast and brightness to a level where the whites are stronger as are the blacks...Be sure to leave a bit of the cloudy edges...looks good for the land under water effect...Now make a new layer...Leave the old one as our specular map if you intend to make a PNG file...then do a select by color selecting black...set at 200 and hit ok...Now with our black selected you can add the land texture in many ways...cloning from another texture and filling in the gaps on the new layer not the specular mind you ...Select inverse and fill with ocean color...You can also use a whole texture as a surface and fill in the selected areas with the oceans...This is faster...

Well thats a start...more to come on getting rid of seams...

Rassilon wrote:Glad you could make it bubba ;)...Did you ever get that texture to work out?

Right, I got the black alpha channel and all like you said, but how do I go about editing it? like how would I change what it looks like in celestia asfar as color etc goes?

Like you would anything else...hue sat and painting...What exactly are you trying to do right now?

Rassilon wrote:Like you would anything else...hue sat and painting...What exactly are you trying to do right now?

So I can just paint things on the black alpha0channel and it will show up right in celestia?