Off the Deep End with ThreeDee

Very Cool 3d..Its like a very early Sim-City or City Block..

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ThreeDee wrote: And now for something completely different...

Wow! That's awesome! I hope you submit that one Three Dee.

I love the nice touch of the little cars on the streets! Is that a surface filter?

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CorvusCroax wrote: Wow! That's awesome! I hope you submit that one Three Dee. I love the nice touch of the little cars on the streets! Is that a surface filter?

Thanks, Corvus -- yes, I did submit it. Quite happy with how it turned out.

Yes, a surface filter, although it could almost have been a simple filter. It's mostly the roofs and trees that needed some shape that made it a surface filter. The shadows are fake, they don't come from the lighting. But they were crucial for the look of the thing.

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Kraellin wrote: hehe, nice one, TD! i've got one similar to that only it's of looking down on hi-rises.

Not in the library, I assume?

Adding that would be another step closer to FooFle Earth!

Corvus already made the rural landscape.

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ThreeDee wrote: Corvus -- yes, I did submit it.

Sweet!

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ThreeDee wrote: Corvus already made the rural landscape.

I think my landscape could use a lot of improvement; it's too slow for example. I'm looking forward to seeing how you did your trees in particular... they look quite nice.)

Zoomed out / Costal city would be cool. Could put directional shading on mountains. The thing I found most challenging for my landscape was the roads, actually. Very hard to get them to look like a proper road system, and have the surrounding areas look right.

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Not in the library, I assume?

no. and i cant find the thing now. it wasnt all that good and came while looking for something else, so i never put much time into that part of it. if i run across it again i'll post up a pic.

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CorvusCroax wrote: I think my landscape could use a lot of improvement; it's too slow for example. I'm looking forward to seeing how you did your trees in particular... they look quite nice.) Zoomed out / Costal city would be cool. Could put directional shading on mountains. The thing I found most challenging for my landscape was the roads, actually. Very hard to get them to look like a proper road system, and have the surrounding areas look right.

The trees are really frickin simple. You'll see.

I had the same thought -- making the roads look like the real thing is going to be the biggest challenge.

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CorvusCroax wrote: Actually, ThreeDee I was thinking about asking you some questions about making a kind of top-down map making filter this morning, before I even saw your cool filter you were making. I'd like to make a filter which makes hex-based wargame maps. Sort of like below. I can handle most of it, except two things: 1) the building placement. What I was thinking was using a the replicate/scatter trick: I'd just place the needed buildings in advance from the source image. 2) This is the hard one: how to get things to snap to the hex organization. The roads should tend toward the centers of the hexes, and the buildings also tend to be snapped toward the center of a hex. Is this even possible? As the person who best understands Offset, do you have any tips?

As long as the entire building fits within ONE hexagon tile, the replicate/scatter trick should do it. The method should work with any pattern that has a "flat" fill mode in it, so you should be able to make it with tiles that are converted to hexagons. This way you can copy every building to every tile, rotate them around the center, and then mask off just the ones you're gonna use. This will take as many "layers" as you have types of building.

It's gonna get more complex if you want to make the hexagons smaller than the building. Of course you could have the background hexagons smaller, like 1:2, in relation to the actual scattering pattern, but the buildings wouldn't snap to each one of them in that case. Or you could do two different size scatter patterns for two different sizes of buildings.

I'll have to clean up that scatter filter to make a snippet out of it. The rotation part is not perfect yet -- I couldn't use Uberzevs Any Angle Rotate for it, so the scaling isn't uniform at every angle. But I think I can fix that.

Should be a piece of cake to modify it to be hexagonal.

ok, i found that filter i was talking about. here's an image i posted a little while back from it: http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...#nav_start look down the page to #5 on that page.

hehe, yeah. it was just something that came up as a result of looking for something else. i prolly wont do anything with it.

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CorvusCroax wrote: Holy @#%! Eek This is some some serious tricky business! Dude, you are truly the renegade master of the offset node. It's great that in the end, you just have a single (!) randomized offset, so it would be easy to make a series of different things scatter, using the same offset, and just separating them w/ threshold. Is it possible to put a control on it to change the number of hexes across? I tried to put an IntSlider on all the nodes with repeats(remapped, of course, as appropriate), but I must be missing something, 'cuz it goes all zig-zaggy. (Is there some constant, which scales with the # of hexes, maybe?)

It's rather tricky, for in order to make the hexagons look right, I had to scale the output horizontally (there are 8 "cells" horizontally and 10 vertically to make it appear correctly proportioned). I'm not even sure why I did it that way instead of making it 4x5 tiling. Could possibly do away with that "fix tiling" step if it works directly with 4x5. Although it is likely to cause other problems the way the filter is currently put together. Nevertheless, the tiles need to be in that proportion to look right.

It would probably be most practical to scale the entire thing with one offset step to 50%, 150% or to 200%. That way they would align.

In other words, you could make it 4x5, 8x10, 12x15, 16x20, etc.

TD

I'm not sure what you're referring to as 5:5 or 4:4+1. The number of hexagonal tiles should be 4:5 (horizontal vs. vertical).

I meant scaling the output at the very end of the whole filter, not at the tiling stage.

Although I suspect that you could make the whole filter simpler if you did it 4x5 at tiling stage. Just that all the other scaling is built around horizontally scaling the pattern currently, which is gonna be a bit complex to undo.

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CorvusCroax wrote: BTW: I think that I figured out something neat to do w/ the pre-randomized hex displacement map: use them to displace things into the center of the hex... ie clean up the edges. I'll give it a try later tonight.

Oh, you mean so that no "houses" go over the edge of the image?

Yeah, I can see that you wouldn't want to make this a repeating pattern type filter.

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CorvusCroax wrote: Sounds like it's actually 4:5.

Yes. And multiples thereof.

i wuold have never thought of doing a histogram filter. very clever. going to publish it?

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ThreeDee wrote: A histogram of the Life Preserver. Yes, it was created in FF.

what is a level trim?

Could of course simplify it to be "Enhance Monochromatic Contrast," which should, in theory, be three times faster.

The only advantage is that it would be AUTO levels, which would enable you to get the full range out of all your RGB channels regardless of what the image looked like. With the Levels component you will either have a fixed amount or a user control.

But I don't know if anyone really needs one or not, so I asked.

I'm looking for a way to automatically stretch the histogram, so the image's brightest pixel is always white and the darkest is always black.

Could you help me with this?

+1 ^^

Thanks ThreeDee!

Actually I'm interested in the trickier method. Right now in the filter I'm working on the user have to manually normalize the result, which is not very user friendly.

Cheers, I'm gonna dissect it today.

After some more testing and looking at HOW the filter remaps the source image into the balls I have seen that is very important HOW this source image is done and the colors included and how many balls will be shown depending on the source colors

Here below I put an example showing that using this source image with many black parts ( this has been made with the Art in the Round filter by CFandM)



You can hide and make many balls missing