Apply opacity map?
Is there anyway, or a special technique to apply a opacity map, based on a texture? Neither texturize or displacement is the right call as far as I can tell.
Closest I got was using a fill with my texture, and using blend mode, I can have the bottom show up through the white parts, but the top will always be black, instead of just showing the layer above.
The wish would be to be able to make a transition between two sheets, not with a fade or blur, but a more non-uniform, texture based, map. Is there a method I'm just not thinking about?
Last resort, I should be able to apply my texture as a alpha map outside of cc3, and create a new fill with the now, semi-transparent fill, but that requires alot more work than just adding an effect.
Comments
There is no specific sheet effect for that, unless you count Color Key, but then you would have to draw your pattern as a set of polygons in a specific colour to match the knockout colour in the Color Key. Even then, it would only work on other polygons and mapped symbols.
It would be quicker if you created it in a bitmap editor if you know your way around one.
Yeah, shouldn't be too hard to do, I would think. Thanks anyway, always good to know where the limit goes!
Wish list for a future sheet effect perhaps!
What exactly were you trying to make transparent?
Was playing around with making a more random blend between two layers of ground, say a dirt on top of rocks. Not either or but more of a sparse mix. My idea was to use somekind of noise filter as an opacity map on the dirt layer.
I did manage to do it via color key, if I used the noise map to produce a pre-colored texture to use as a fill, with a color key on the dirt sheet. In the end, for my usecase here it was to much work to tweak the external parameters and updating in CC3 to see how it looked to make it worthwhile, the area was too small, and the randomness wasn't always in the right place for a good look..
In different cirumstances it will work fine, but probably more useful for larger areas than I wanted now. But an sheet effect like texturize, but for opacity instead, would be much easier to quickly play around with, so that would be nice in the future for sure.
You could make a small symbol set of pacthes of the terrain you want to blend over in a bitmap editor, import them in the symbol manager and make a random collection of them. These are terran patches for Forest Trail.
No part of these symbols are fully opaque, as that still causes hard lines between the two shades.
Here is the result in the Ranger's Hill example map.
It sounds like you want to apply the alpha channel from an external image file to the current working sheet results in the same way that texturize applies the red channel of an external image file to the current rgb values. There isn't a direct way to do that in the current system. The symbol decal method that Sue demonstrated (perhaps automated by use of Symbols in Area and its "Only place symbols within" option along with the random layout pattern) might get you a fair way toward your goal at the cost of generating new geometry.
That could perhaps be workable. I'll have to play around with it a bit and see how that goes.
Sadly my artistic skills are severely lacking, so I generally have to rely on the tools present to get the look I'm looking for.
These were created by using a circular splodge of grunge brush dots as a mask over the original texture. I believe in this case I used Affinity, but you can do it in most bitmap editors as long as you can apply a mask to a layer. GIMP is free, and can do the job. So can a lot of other free bitmap editors.
Open the VH version of the texture in the bitmap editor, apply a mask to the layer so that none of it is visible, and then paint grunge brush dots onto the centre of the mask to reveal how much or how little you want of it. Stay away from the edges of the texture, or you will end up with hard straight lines.
The result should be exported as png file with a transparent background into an appropriate symbol folder, which in the case of home made symbols we recommend should be a folder called User within the main Symbols folder.
Then when you come to import them in the Symbol Manager you can set up options for them in which they are randomly rotated or flipped between each click. That helps a lot with the blending.
If you have a go and get stuck, just shout.
Seemed like I missed your reply when typing my own, but yes, that's more or less what I was after, using the alpha channel for texturize was my vision. Using Symbols in Area is a very good suggestion that I'll have to try out.
I'll give your suggestions a whirl. I think I got the technicalities down, it's just about getting the look I'm aiming for I think. But much like jslayton, using manual symbols is the way to go instead of my first attempt, much easier to adjust the result on the fly. Lots easier to create more alternatives instead of trying to tweak the one texture fill.
Thanks alot!
Good luck :)
As a general note to anyone reading this thread, I should add at this point that if you are thinking of joining the current village competition you won't be able to include home made symbols in your competition map. This is to maintain the usability of the Community Atlas.
For those curious, the symbol way was very doable. While a opacity map filter is still on my internal wishlist, it wasn't too bad to go the symbol route. Comparing these two, the one with a fill, and regular edge fade, and stacked symbols making it seem more like a random dusting than a full cover.
Much like Sue suggested, I did two collections of random symbols, one larger more circular and semi-transparent, and one smaller, with a noise mask over, to get some randomness to the holes. Combined it didn't turn out halfbad methinks.
Regular fill:
Random symbols with transparencies:
So far so good, now there just the rest to go..
edit Using Symbol in Area didn't really work with the symbols I made, so perhaps that would need some other type of symbols, or more tweaks to the settings, this was manually placed, with a random collection.
This looks very nice.
Now that I can see a visualization of what you're doing, I'm wondering if drawing multiple polygon shapes with the SOLID 10 through SOLID 90 transparency fills would also work, placing them on sheets with an Edge Fade effect? (This would also allow your FCW file to be shared with folks who don't have your custom symbols, such as in the Atlas, but that may not be a factor for you.) But since this looks nice, so no need to try anything different unless it's too labor-intensive to place all of the symbols or you want a shareable option.