1.2 Displacement maps
As I said before, well add some shadows at the borders of selected zones . Hand painting
them would be a nightmare. There would be one easy way : Photoshop layers are able to cast a
shadow over the background.
But I chose a trickier way which gives much better results. The displace filter allows to
move each pixel of an amount defined by a displacement map, which is a picture in
psd format. Therefore, its easy to stretch some black pixels over the areas
we want to shade. This allows us to make realistic irregular shadows.
Here are the specific displacement maps I use for
Evergreen/mixed forest
Urban areas.
NOTE :
I called them DMtrees and DMBuildings. (Convert them to grey levels
and save as psd if you want to use these). Note that DMBuildings is designed for
a 220° sun position!
Refer to the Photoshop help files for more details about displacement maps.
- Well use the displace filter as well in order to make the forest borders look
irregular and random. I called this map DMRandomLarge and made also a much smaller version
for smaller irregularities. (You can use it once converted to psd format and experiment!)
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