Gemstone Ore by capnsparrow

I love your Variation 4, Capn!
I can see you working and expanding this one to include other sorts of raw minerals... ???

The gems are looking awesome!
There is something about the rock part though that isnt reading too well as rock. Maybe it is a bit too angular?

I really think you caught the raw beauty of untouched gems in this sample above, Capn... very convincing for me

Maybe a google or wiki search to find some images of the sort of rock material you might find these sorts of gems hiding in would help? I haven't found any myself (tried to look under 'raw gems' and 'mining gems' but found nothing yet. And I like your idea for the extra color control for them too, just don't loose that depth you've achieved with your black gradient

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capnsparrow wrote: I saved a completely different filter over the top of one I was building it from. Crying

Ouch... I'm still recovering from doing that more than once!

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capnsparrow wrote: sometimes I have 'beta' 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.

Me too, but it took me a little longer than you I think to learn my lesson

BTW, have you checked out any of the other rock filters for the actual rock gems could be embedded in? I liked one by PogS at http://www.filterforge.com/filters/3104.html
That one makes me think of something you'd see in very deep ore mines, where I hear a lot of gems are sometimes hidden in or around. But I still like your raw gem effect, it will be nice for gamers to have more than just plain rock for texturing with

Well... I found a lot of photos of the real thing by looking up 'lapidary supplies' on google. There are a host of sites which sell unprocessed pieces with various precious and semi-precious stones.

I soon realized something I should have known from the beginning however: each type of gemstone is found in a specific type of host stone, as gems are nothing more than a crystalline version of the host stone in most cases. Sometimes the host will be a mix of minerals, but one of them is usually a 'parent' mineral to the gems. (For instance: Rubies are a form of Corrundum, and strangely enough... so are Sapphires.)

Anyway... just wanted to thank everyone for so much input on this one!

Wow!!! That last sample pic is totally awesome!!!

Thanks so much for all the kind words.

I submitted the update a few minutes ago. I also included 6 additional new presets, to show a little of the possibilities with the added color control.

Here are just a couple of samples (Note: these are not anti-aliased):

(A better orange, using a dark brown in place of the black):


(A light blue, using white in place of the black):


I'm actually rather glad to finally be done with this update. I've been working on this filter for almost 6 days, and now I can go back to the other zillion I have in various stages of completion.

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capnsparrow wrote: (A light blue, using white in place of the black):

What a great new texture filter... especially like this one Capn!!!

Very nice, this last pic is much better!
And with a bump map you should have something looking very bumpy and touchable

Thanks

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Rawn (RawArt) wrote: a displacement channel

I would love to be able to do that, but I don't currently have a 3D package which supports displacement channels. The closest I could come would be to use the bump map in Bryce, as a height field for a terrain object. (Although... I suppose I could create 3 'symmetrical lattice' objects, and position them to look like a cube... Might have to try that... )

Well... even though I said I was done with this one, I ended up playing with it a bit more. I'm undecided about whether to change it further, but here is one last version:



Not really sure if there is enough difference to make it worth updating.

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ahimsa wrote: I'm wondering if there is some other way to get the bump maps to work better in Bryce on this.

Well... I had been thinking of a way to do this, and your post just made me go ahead and try it.

If you create one of the 'symmetrical lattice' objects, and use the bump map as the height information, you will get a really exaggerated version. All you need to do then, is adjust the overall height down to about 5% of where it starts.

Then you just flip that object on its side, and use the diffuse map (or, as I did, the fully rendered map) as the diffuse and ambient textures. (I also used the specularity map, so the crystal areas would keep their nice shine.)

Then I just made two copies of that, and positioned them to tile the whole thing into a wall. Here's the result:



In this way, you can almost fake the way a displacement map is used. (It is really just a 'height field' mesh... like a terrain... but it definitely gives more depth to the result.

(One other note: I disabled the sky and sunlight, and used an area light instead. Sometimes I'm not keen on the effects of the sky on my objects, and in this case, I imagined this texture being in a cave or something underground, where reflections of clouds would look a bit out of place. )

Hope this helps out in some way!