Foxxee's Stone Engraver by Foxxee

Another sample, but with a request... if anyone has any ideas how I might be able to improve the depth of the carving, so it's fuller, rounder, more three dimensional?
Thanks

hi foxxee,

for a very simple addition to depth, add a levels as the last component before the 'surface color' node and set the black point to about 10 and the white to about 90. this shld help.

but i also notice you've got a quadruple threshold going on there. i'm pretty sure at least one, if not two of these could be eliminated or re-worked to simplify things.

well, i think (with what little i looked at the filter) that the trick here is going to be isolating each effect into its own leg and then combining them back near the end. like, do the frame separate, the height effect separate, the stone effect separate and so on, each on its own leg. this makes correcting and tweaking much more logical. then simply blend them all into one afterwards.

what i could see was trying to do everyting in one or two legs and this often makes it hard to tweak just one aspect of the filter and retain the other aspects.

btw, hope you're doing better

I missed this one.....great work.....and excellent sample pic!!!

I would suggest two versions of it.....flat and textured like it currently is.....and a glazed version......eh???

hi la fox,

had another look and play with the filter. not real sure at this point. your actual original line may be ok since you are using some of that early effect passed through later effects to gain the overall. i can eliminate one or even two of the thresholds but it does change things a bit and trying not to do that.

the more height problem is one i've tested before, with limited results. in fact, i have a filter called 'depth', which is exactly that, a test of depth. and frankly, i couldnt get much more than you already have, at least with the one technique.

what you might do is look at the some of the pattern filters that seem to have quite a bit of depth and explore what they do. i believe they are layering. i can do some layering in yours, but it's just not very good yet.

also, i was curious as to how much detail you wanted to get in your 'engraving'.

well, the problem with surface filters and lighting is actually the HDRI environments. they are not based on the source image one imports, so you get skewed lighting and therefore skewed height control.

according to Ron Hubbards "Art" book (you can get this at amazon.com), there are actually eight different ways to get a depth perceptic. i'm not going to reprint that here, but it's quite fascinating and he refers to other sources for more info as well. everyone knows about the color wheel for coloring, but not many are aware of all eight ways to show depth. most know about shadows and light, as in drop shadows and about vanishing points and that sort of thing, but i'd be surprised if all artists were familiar with depth through color and some of the other methods.

the problem is partially FF. like i said, the hdri's are a pretty much fixed lighting source, with some control in the lateral movement of the environment, but because the lights and darks of the environment dont match up, necessarily to the source image, depth becomes more difficult in a surface filter and often completely horrible. i originally had hoped for more control on the height control, but it's somewhat fickle, giving flattened tops and that 'platic' look we sometimes see when height is turned way up.

i mentioned the pattern filters as another method, since they arent relying on the hdri environments and if you look at some of those, you'll see some rather amazing depth, usually with a dark background and lighter foreground. one of the other experiments i've done is to expand this concept even further into multi-tiered layering, but that's still in the works.

one interesting thing FF could do is lighting environments based on the source imported image. you'd take the natural lighting of your source image and use that to create more depth and dynamic lighting, but the rendering times would probably go way up as a result. so, not sure of that yet.

one thing you could try would be to do an hdri environment of the same image you want to add depth to. that might have some interesting results, but wouldnt work for texture filters, since there's no imported image. and even with imports you'd still have the problem of uploading the environment and all the problems incumbent with that.

my best guess, for your filter, would be to try to do the layered or tiered effect of the pattern filters. but that might require some sorting of the original image into light levels.

so, i dont have a quick fix, other than adding that levels component and that still isnt going to get the kind of depth i think you want here.