Terminology. Rugosity on borders

[groovey]

Super dumb question here.

I wanted to research how to achieve the effect applied in the awesome elevation maps from Pixie here, you see, the way the BORDERS (not shapes) of each color are not smooth, but have some kind of rugosity? Problem is, I have no idea of how that effect is called. I don't mean the overall shape of each color area, I can get interesting irregular shapes with clouds render and posterize, it's the not smoothness of the actual borders that I want to replicate.

English is not my first language, but I don't know how to call it in Spanish either since the keywords I use to look for answers don't come close to what I want to do with the borders of my shapes. So I'm stuck.

Anyone knows how said effect is called and since we're here, how to achieve it?

[Azélor]

In photoshop, I think the brush option is called hardness, under the size of the brushes? The opposite would be soft or blurry. Like this ? http://striegle51839.c4.cmdwebsites..../hardness1.jpg

But I could be wrong since my PS is not in English either.

[groovey]

I see, so it can only be done manually with brushes. I thought maybe there would be an opposite to the "feather" option in the select menu that instead of smoothening borders would make them more "broken". Oh well.


Thanks Azelor, you're a real treasure to this place.

[waldronate]

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=9056 shows a way to get rough borders on areas. You can set a stroke to get the edges and fill to 0% to just leave the stroke. You should be able to get some aliasing with a little work.

[Azélor]

I see, so it can only be done manually with brushes. I thought maybe there would be an opposite to the "feather" option in the select menu that instead of smoothening borders would make them more "broken". Oh well.


Thanks Azelor, you're a real treasure to this place.

Using the brushes is only one way to have a ''hard'' border. I'm not sure what your doing. Your drawing shapes with the feather and fills them afterwards?

[ravells]

I'm not sure I understand your question, but if you are looking at softening the edges on the contours then you could use the select / feather tools in photoshop? Maybe a picture of what you have next to the bit of Pixies picture of what you want might help me understand a bit better?

:: Edit:: Just read Azelor's post above mine - +1

[groovey]

Hi again fellow guildies.

I agree I could have been a bit more clear using pictures. This is the kind of thing I get when I do a heightmap, my color borders are too clean and the colors don't blend at all, they just stack on top of each other:



Compared with one like Pixie's (notice not only how the color layers blend but the irregularity of the borders of each color itself, making it look more realistic):


(The original is from the thread linked in the first post. Sorry it doesn't zoom in much. Pixie I hope you don't mind me meddling with your stuff)

So I'm hoping achieving the rugosity on the borders, for which I think waldronate's link could do (great find, I could find it useful for many other things too, though I have to play a bit with the scale of the noise to make it work like the discussion indicates), I can improve the blending of the colors and having it look more realistic.

By the way, the feather techique just makes it all blurry, not just the borders as I would like, which doesn't work for me. I guess a could play around a bit with the select options, like select the shape, use contract, then invert selection and apply feather to the borders only, to get something like this:


EDIT: nah, when stacking the different layers with this technique the whole thing is super blurry and the borders too smooth. Playing with the layers opacity could help the blending though.


I don't know if I should bother though, the practical side of me tells me I only use the heightmaps for info purposes when world-building, but another side of me cries seeing my ugly maps, I can't make anything look pretty.


Anyway, thanks a lot for all the input. I'll try to do research about blending and try to roughen the borders with the technique waldronate linked to.

[Azélor]

Attachment 74503

Look at this carefully. I used illustrator to vectorize the file some time ago and this is what I ended up with. But, if I make the image smaller, it looks closer to the original. I'm thinking that the effect your looking for could have been generated by the compression of the map because the original is probably much bigger.

That doesn't explain how he got the random / not-so-random borders tough.

[waldronate]

More detail is generally achieved by copying in similar topographic information from an existing heightmap, by doing lots of manual work, or by letting a program like Wilbur (some other procedural generator) do lots of work on your behalf. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=29412 has a number of examples where simple masks (i.e. each color in your height map) can be turned into fairly complex results. Volume 4 and the CSU Johnsondale articles are probably the most applicable.

[Pixie]

Well, it's manual work, in the case of that map. A lot of manual work.

The map has 22 levels of height, from dark green to dark brown - each level is individually drawn/refined at a high level of zoom, but it is always of one solid color. The trick is really, as I discovered over the process, to work locally and at high zoom. The outcome to this is that a lot of the pixels near the border will be partially transparent, but not evenly as if you did a Feather action. I tipically "carve" the border at 3200% zoom.

Now, this is time consuming. Very time consuming. Wilbur, at a regional scale, will yield very good results at a fraction of the time spent. And turning a grayscale map into a map that looks like that map of mine (or like the pastel colored with relief shading that I made some time ago) isn't so difficult. I am waiting on that make-a-tutorial lite chalenge to write about this.

Reading through this thread earlier today gave me just the impulse I needed to finally record a small video of my technique. It's a far to big file to share here, but I'll send it to you groovey - it should settle your curiosity

And by the way, that vectorized image of my file looks really nice!