Generating Height Maps in Photoshop

hello my name is Leo light so welcomes us with you aware what we're gonna do is take a look at how we can generate a height map inside Adobe Photoshop now there may be multiple purposes as to why you may want to do this for example you may not have the time to create high-frequency detail in order for you to bake that high frequency detail to low poly model it may be that you don't have access to third-party tools such as a nd or maybe a zebra or something along those lines so what we can do is we can use a couple of tips and techniques inside Photoshop to generate a height map now before we do that we have to understand a little bit about what a height map is a height map is a map that uses a black and white scale and the areas of the image that are black are gonna be recessed all sort of extruded inwards and the areas that are further to the to the white pixels are going to be extruded outwards so without a mind let's go ahead and get started so I'm going to go and press the control J here to make a duplicate here so let's just create a difficut and we are going to go to image adjustments and I'm gonna choose black and white and press ok then I'm going to go over to image adjustments and choose layers and I'm gonna push the the little arrow here across and that's just play around easel oh no more now the idea is I don't want this to go all the way to White's like we did with the normal map because with an own map we just want to sort of make as much contrast as possible to get sort of crevasses here but because the idea in this technique is that the variance of the colors of the black and white scale is going to determine the extrusion that will happen to the polygons so we don't want something like this otherwise we're just gonna get pebbles that turn out to be very flat on the top so we want to push this to maybe somewhere like so and press ok now some of this is just going to be you playing around with the values and really is that you're looking for here after that we're gonna go to image adjustments and one more time let's let the sounds go to curves image adjustments curves and I'm just gonna push this over a little bit higher like so now what's done that I'm gonna go and press ctrl J to make another tip okay and the reason for that is we want to use the original image a little bit later on to fine tune the height detail but for now with the duplicated level we'll the duplicated layer let's go to filter 3d and it's stead of going to generate normal map as we have done in a previous tutorial we're gonna go ahead and choose generate bump map now a bump map is an older technique in computer graphics that was used just where we use a black or white image to give the appearance that something has depth but just like a normal map when you look at it at an extreme angle you're not really gonna get too much detail here so we can play around with some of these values in here if you don't know what these values are I would highly recommend that you would look at my generating a normal map tutorial and I sort of go through these options here now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play around these blurred values so the idea is I want to blur this just enough that we remove a lot of the high frequency details on top of the pebbles but not too much that we lose all the detail you see something like this wouldn't be it really being workable so let's have a look here let's push this up a little higher okay so I think around in this particular case 4.8 is gonna be pretty good and then we can play around with the detail scale and the lower this is that the lower the pebbles will appear to be so I'm gonna place this quite high I think maybe perhaps max I'm gonna go ahead and press okay so this is the bump map that it's generated but we want to make more or have more detail in the crevices of the pebbles and so this is why we are now gonna go back to the layer below which and which is the original image that we used to generate our our bump map here and we're gonna drag it above and then we're gonna go to filter blur and Gaussian blur and the idea here again is that we want to blur this just enough that we remove most the detail but not too much that we remove a lot of it so in this case we want to retain as much of the black areas between the pebbles here but also remove a lot of the high-frequency detail on top of the pebbles so I think around 2.5 is okay and from here we're gonna go right to the blending modes and we're gonna change this down to overlay so overlay that's okay and you may also want to try hard line so overlay are hard like I tend to think loops a little better I think how light in this particular case has retained more detail so this point we're pretty much set so we can go ahead and merge these layers and we can go ahead and and save this so let's go file save as and we can go and choose desktop and I'm gonna call it height map and I'm gonna save this as a Targa file and that's okay now before we exit Photoshop and see how this looks like in Mac's we can also preview this inside inside Photoshop in order to do that all we have to do is go over to the 3d top here and if you don't see this top we go to Windows and just make sure that 3d is enabled and we can go ahead and make sure we check this option here the one that says make from displace map and go ahead and choose create now give Photoshop a few moments to think about it and what it will do is it will go ahead and generate a piece of 3d geometry here now you can see that we have the texture here selected which is not what we want and at the bottom left here we have some of the tools here that we're gonna last a rotate so let's just rotate this around let's select there and we're gonna click this little square here and push this down and we can see what this is done so we get an OK preview here but let's jump over to max and see what we get over here so I create a plane and I'm gonna go to geometry so you modify I'm gonna set this so maybe something like 500 by 500 some however although the geometry here we press the M key and then it sets an empty slot and I'm gonna go to choose diffuse bitmap I'm gonna choose desktop and then go ahead and choose Heights map so let's find that height map over here and then from the modify panel let's go and add its place and I'm gonna check this option says lumen Center we're gonna set this top one and we can then go ahead and click the material over here and left click and drag it over to the maps and choose instance and we can simply increase the strength okay and as you can see at this point this is the detail that we've created so maybe if we give this a little bit of specularity so you can see exactly what we've created here so without being said we can then simply just increase or decrease the strength yeah so something we like we could also if we won't go ahead and bring in the actual diffuse texture here so I believe I named this color and we can assign this and that's it so what we've done is we've used the a few techniques inside Photoshop here to generate this height map and that's it that's a that's a simple and easy way to donate a height map in Photoshop if you liked this tutorial please let me know in the comments below don't forget to subscribe until next time for now

Channel: GameDevMan

Views: 115,839

Keywords: Generating Height Maps in Photoshop, Height, Map, 3D, Max, Generating, Create, Tutorial, GameDevMan, Height Map, Displace, Depth

Id: Rw1c_duc4Cg

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018