Tutorial by Danny Mcauliffe ..............

Desert Stone

I'm going to try show you how I made the maps for this Desert scene

The Maps

first I start off with two pictures like the ones bellow

Using Photo Shop I join them together

and clean them up a bit so you cant see any bad seams. The file below

ended up about 5 mb , I've had to cut them all down for this Tutorial

so use your own pictures to make the maps.

I save this as *Diff.jpg

then I make a gray scale copy and save it as *bump.jgp

then I set the contrast up to get a more defined look and save it as *dissLowRes.jpg

now for the hi res displacement map I do a little more.

reload the bump.jpg into photo shop

then make a copy of the background layer and turn the Opacity to %50

Invert the top layer

this should give you a gray image like the one below

don't worry this is not a mistake .

with the top layer still selected apply a Gaussian Blur

you will have to play around with the setting to get the right effect.

you want to bring back some of the detail but not to much .

once you are happy with the result flatten the layers

so now you should have one layer

that should look something like this

now you need to bing back the levels

so hit AutoLevel

this should give you something like this

save it as *diss fine.jpg

you have leveled out the image without cutting to much detail. This process works very well with big images .repeat the above steps but make some variations to your settings one for the gloss level and one for the specular level and one without converting to gray scale for the specular color .so you should now have the basic maps you need

so load them up into the Material editor in 3D max

Make a two flat planes the same as below or click on the picture to download the Max file

see my An introduction to Displacement mapping on how to set up Mentalray

Add a displace modifier to both planes . You may have to increase the mesh to get the right effect. add the dissLowRes.jpgto the Bit map slot of the displacement modifer .Set the displacement strength so you start to see the effect . I made a new set of maps for the bottom plane using the above steps . I also added a few dark lines to my displacement maps ,you can see the map and the effect on the mesh below.

Apply the material you just made to the upright plane and render if your settings in mentalray are correct you should have a image like the one at the top of this page and thats about it for now.

The floor in the image above was done using a displacement map like the one below tiled 4 or 5 times.

© Danny Mcauliffe 2007