Photoshop & Lightwave

.
Fantasy Letter by Erik Brimstedt



Back
Page 1
Description
You get to create an old piece of paper and the tutorial takes you through all the steps. You need to know the basics of both Lightwave and Photoshop, though the tutorial is step by step it does not explain where everything is or what things do.
Introduction
Okay, we'll do a tutorial on heavy texturing now, turning a simple flat plane with a bunch of polygons into an old piece of paper with handwriting on it. 50% of the work will be done in Photoshop, and there's where we'll start. In the end, you'll hopefully have something looking like the following picture.


Picture 1: The finished image

Photoshop

Lets get going! Start by loading up Photoshop. I'm using version 6 but I'm sure this can be done in earlier versions to. Set the background colour to white, and the foreground colour to black, and then create a new document - 21cm wide and 29cm high.

Select the Airbrush tool, and then change the pressure to 100%. I am using the smallest of the sharp square brushes, look at picture 2 to check my settings.

Picture 2: The settings for the airbrush tool

Okay, what we'll do now is draw a line how we want the edges of our Fantasy letter to look. Put some time in this to get a good result, picture 3 is my creation. Start drawing about 1cm in on the image, and not at the very edges.

Picture 3: Draw an outline using the airbrush tool

Save this outline as outline.jpg somewhere on your hard-drive now, if something should go wrong we are safe. Finished with that part? Good, select the Paint bucket tool, and set the pressure to 100%. Now click somewhere on the outer side of this line to fill it with black, looking something like picture 4. Note, the following picture is smaller than the actual image; it's just to show you what part should be filled with black.

Picture 4: Fill the outer area with black

The first map we will create for Lightwave is the Clip Map, but before we need to make sure that the edges are really sharp, and we can fix this by adjusting the Levels. Use the Magnify tool and zoom in a corner of your paper, looking something like picture 5. I zoomed in the lower left corner.

Picture 5: A zoomed in corner; note the AntiAliasing that we need to get rid of.

Okay, select "Image -> Adjust -> Levels" and a panel should appear. Use the following settings.

Picture 6: Adjust the Levels with the settings in the window. Note how the AntiAliasing disappears.

Click OK when you've entered the values shown, and the AntiAliasing is gone, now you can zoom out again to regular size. This is it for our Clip Map. Select "Save As" in the File menu and set the filename to "Paper_Clip.jpg".

Okay, lets get on with creating a transparency map. In the History Panel, the latest action should be the "Levels" one, as in picture 7.

Picture 7: History Panel

We need to undo the last action here, so click on the "Paint Bucket" action in the history panel; this will remove the "Levels" action. Okay, we will apply a filter to the edges of this paper now to use as transparency later on, so select "Filter -> Sketch -> Water Paper". Set the Fiber Length to 4, the Brightness to 70 and the Contrast to 77, then click OK.

The edges of our paper will now be "fiberized". Save this image as "Paper_Transp.jpg".

Okay, now we need a Displacement Map. Undo the Fiber action in the History Panel and get back to the last Paint Bucket action (like before when we undo'ed the Adjust Levels action).

Select the Magic Wand tool, set the Tolerance to 30 in the Magic Wand Options panel and then click somewhere on the outer black area. This will make a selection that follows the outer line perfectly. In the menu, choose "Select -> Inverse", which will inverse the selection so we are working with the white area.

Select "Edit -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid" and set the Gridline to every 50 pixels. Also set the subdivisions to 1, then click OK. Turn on the Grid from the "View -> Show" menu, but turn off Snap to Grid. What you have now should look something like picture8.

Picture 8: Grid is on, Snap to Grid is off, and the Magic Wand tool has been used.