A few questions on how to improve this image to obtain a good pattern

I have been tinkering a little with Crazy Bump beta for Mac... I don't have a copy of Windows so I'm not really able to mess with the ShaderMap pro that others are using but CB seems to be capable of similar results...

The attached images are the original jpg file and the displacement map created with Crazy Bump and how it looks in Designer as a pattern. It's pretty close but there are some areas that I'm not crazy about.. The center cross on the shield needs work and the area just outside the shield to the left and lower right has some weird height changes going on... Not sure how to edit the image to eliminate the height issues as that seems like something Crazy Bump did and I haven't been able to stumble on combination of settings to change that yet. The center cross I think I just need to make the beveled edges all the same shade to fix that.

The first thing I'm thinking needs to be done is to convert the original image to grayscale and apply shades of gray with respect to how I want the heightmap to look once brought into designer after running through Crazy Bump again...

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Ton80, for that type of image, start working with the gray scale first, with lightest gray being the top and black the bottom. Make the background black for easy removal in designer. Yes change it to gray scale and work on it from there.

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Originally Posted by eelamb

Ton80, for that type of image, start working with the gray scale first, with lightest gray being the top and black the bottom. Make the background black for easy removal in designer. Yes change it to gray scale and work on it from there.

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Hi Ed,

So I went back to Gimp and went grayscale and then traced around the center cross which was something I wanted to fix. Messed around a little and ended up applying a gradient around it. Once I had that fixed I inverted the grayscale image so it looked like a negative and sent it out to Crazy Bump for the displacement map... still the results are mixed when going to crazy bump. The details of the pattern itself are good but I suppose the "lighting" ( if that is the proper way to describe it ) that is applied is casting shadows so I have some hills and valleys on the outside of the pattern detail and I can't find a way to get rid of them.

Went back to GIMP and just applied a little Gaussian Blur to the inverted grayscale image and brought that into designer and I've got what I think is a pretty good pattern.. wish I could figure out why CB is doing what it is but I am going to have to take the image and mess with it on my Dad's laptop ( windows ) using ShaderMap to see if I get different results... but, after seeing what GIMP did on it's own, maybe the Invert and Gaussian Blur are all I really need.

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When you make a displacement map using ShaderMap, is that just essentially adding the Gaussian Blur or is there something additional going on that makes a better pattern, in your opinion?

Thx
John

You are right using gimp alone will get you the results you want. SMP has a few features such as changing the amount of Gaussian Blur to give you crisper edges. But working in gimp will give you the same results. Alan Malmstrom has some great tutorials on doing this in gimp. May want to send him a pm for his website, and look into those tutorials.

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Originally Posted by Ton80

I have been tinkering a little with Crazy Bump beta for Mac... I don't have a copy of Windows so I'm not really able to mess with the ShaderMap pro that others are using but CB seems to be capable of similar results...

The attached images are the original jpg file and the displacement map created with Crazy Bump and how it looks in Designer as a pattern. It's pretty close but there are some areas that I'm not crazy about.. The center cross on the shield needs work and the area just outside the shield to the left and lower right has some weird height changes going on... Not sure how to edit the image to eliminate the height issues as that seems like something Crazy Bump did and I haven't been able to stumble on combination of settings to change that yet. The center cross I think I just need to make the beveled edges all the same shade to fix that.

The first thing I'm thinking needs to be done is to convert the original image to grayscale and apply shades of gray with respect to how I want the heightmap to look once brought into designer after running through Crazy Bump again...

Attachment 54963Attachment 54964

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John, I made a small PDF to show the image with the ShaderMap program that I made.

You can clean the image and use only the Pattern Editor, This gives an image more like a LOGO (flat).