mask tutorial?

General Discussion
1

Been useing WM to make masks, but not always getting what I want. Is there a tutorial for making masks with WM?
I have a reputation for over lokking the obvious, so I’ve probebly over looked it if there is one, and if there isn’t, why not?

2

I believe there is a Tip of the Month for this, in the Help section of the main site. http://www.world-machine.com/tip2/tip2.html Enjoy!

  • Oshyan
3

Thanks Osh, but I already figured that out on my own. I’ve been experamenting with using other filters for making masks; hieght spliter, and a couple of the selecters. I was hoping for some thing a bit more indepth.

4

Well, what further specific information would you want? By “in-depth”, what do you mean, exactly? Once the basic process is explained, it’s a matter of your own personal taste and experiments in terms of what will work best for your scenes. Do you mean you want specific examples of where masks from certain devices might be used? If you give us some direction, we might be able to provide further detail.

  • Oshyan
5

I don’t know, I was just looking for ideas of how to make masks. Maybe evryone that makes masks with world machine could tell how they do what.

I have found the hieght spliter is great to make river bed/bank masks. I put the lowest two hieghts ;usualy of six, through claps. set the clamp to expand and max it. It just saves me having to put it through a photo editor for lightening and adding contrast.

6

There is a mask I use a lot : the flow map (second output of the Erosion device).
You must lighten and contrast it a lot in order to use it (what you can achieve with the Bias/Gain device, or using an external program like photoshop), but it makes an excellent mask for snow, using SO Image Overlay set to Total Overlay mode.

This is what I did for this pic :
http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1025297

7

I’ve been playing around with this sort of thing and I find that I’m not really happy with it yet.
I can never really seem to find the right balance of brightness and contrast.
Any PP tips for this?

8

King Mango: if you’re speaking of the Flow Map + Bias/Gain, I usually use Gain at max and Bias to something between 0.90 and max…
Note that the preview isn’t really representative, so I usually first test with a 513x513 terrain because it is fast to build.

9

Oh sure. I never thought of bias gain in WM lol
There’s still so many things I haven’t explored…
Thank you will give that a go.
Actually I forgot to point out the first thing that struck me about erosion output was the seeming spikiness of the lower two outputs.
Because each of these outputs seemed so weak by itself I usually combine two or all three of these maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong.