Fantasy Letter

Okay, we’ll do a tutorial on heavy texturing now, turning a simple flat plane with a bunch of polygons into an old piece of paper with handwriting on it. 50% of the work will be done in Photoshop, and there’s where we’ll start. In the end, you’ll hopefully have something looking like the following picture.


Lets get going! Start by loading up Photoshop. I’m using version 7 but I’m sure this can be done in earlier versions to. Set the background colour to white, and the foreground colour to black, and then create a new document – 21cm wide and 29cm high.

Select the Brush tool, and and make sure the pressure and flow of the brush is set to 100%. I am using the smallest brush that represents 1 pixel; look at picture 2 to check my settings.


Okay, what we’ll do now is draw a line how we want the edges of our Fantasy letter to look. Put some time in this to get a good result, picture 3 is my creation. Start drawing about 1cm in on the image, and not at the very edges.


Save this outline as outline.jpg somewhere on your hard-drive now, if something should go wrong we are safe. Finished with that part? Good, select the Paint bucket tool, and set the pressure to 100%. Now click somewhere on the outer side of this line to fill it with black, looking something like picture 4. Note, the following picture is smaller than the actual image; it’s just to show you what part should be filled with black.


The first map we will create for Lightwave is the Clip Map, but before we need to make sure that the edges are really sharp, and we can fix this by adjusting the Levels. Use the Magnify tool and zoom in a corner of your paper, looking something like picture 5. I zoomed in the lower left corner.


Okay, select “Image -> Adjustments -> Levels” and a panel should appear. Use the following settings.


Click OK when you’ve entered the values shown, and the AntiAliasing is gone, now you can zoom out again to regular size. This is it for our Clip Map. Select “Save As” in the File menu and set the filename to “Paper_Clip.jpg”.

Okay, lets get on with creating a transparency map. In the History Panel, the latest action should be the “Levels” one, as in picture 7.



We need to undo the last action here, so click on the “Paint Bucket” action in the history panel; this will remove the “Levels” action. Okay, we will apply a filter to the edges of this paper now to use as transparency later on, so select
“Filter -> Sketch -> Water Paper”. Set the Fiber Length to 4, the Brightness to 70 and the Contrast to 77, then click OK.

The edges of our paper will now be “fiberized”. Save this image as “Paper_Transp.jpg”.

Okay, now we need a Displacement Map. Undo the Fiber action in the History Panel and get back to the last Paint Bucket action (like before when we undo’ed the Adjustment Levels action).

Select the Magic Wand tool, set the Tolerance to 30 in the Magic Wand Options panel and then click somewhere on the outer black area. This will make a selection that follows the outer line perfectly. In the menu, choose “Select -> Inverse”, which will inverse the selection so we are working with the white area.

Select “Edit -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid” and set the Gridline to every 50 pixels. Also set the subdivisions to 1, then click OK. Turn on the Grid from the “View -> Show” menu, but turn off Snap to Grid. What you have now should look something like picture 8.


Select the Brush tool, set the Opacity to 100% and the Flow to 5%. Select a 35 sized soft round brush from the brushes panel and then paint the edges here and there to add some darker areas. Then pick out a vertical grid line that is closest to the middle of the paper, and paint along that grid line. Then use 2 horizontal grid lines and paint along those. Look at picture 9 and you’ll know what I mean.


You can change sizes of brushes as you like, but try to get as similar to picture 9 as possible. Also use a big brush, 100-200, and paint all over the image to get rid of all the white. When you are done, deselect the selection and save this as “Paper_Disp.jpg”.

Now use the Magic Wand tool again to select the outer black area, and then inverse the selection. Change the Background colour to R: 215 G: 182 B: 131, and the Foreground colour to R: 236 G: 202 B: 142.

Use the Magic Wand tool again to select the outer black area, then invert the selection. Now we are going to alter the colour settings for this image a bit, so select “Image -> Adjustments -> Colour Balance”. The first thing to do here is to uncheck the “Preserve Luminosity” option. Then select the “Shadows” Channel and use the values shown in picture 10.



Use the same values for all three channels; click OK when you’re done.

Now we’re just going to add a filter to simulate some paper fibres and we’re done! Select “Filter -> Texture -> Texturizer” and use the settings shown in picture 11.


We are going to make the tone of the paper a bit more yellowish. Select “Layer -> New -> Layer” from the menu to create a new layer with the default settings.

Set the foreground colour to R: 255 G: 174 B: 0 and then select “Edit -> Fill” from the menu. In the options panel that comes up, select to fill with the foreground colour and then click OK. The New Layer we have should now be filled with the orange colour. Set the opacity of this layer to 50% and set the Blending mode to “Multiply”. That’s pretty much it; picture 12 shows the finished colour map. Flatten the Layers now and then save it as “Paper_Col.jpg”.


Only one map left to create! The Text. You can use what you want for this, if you want to create a treasure map, or a letter like me, it’s up to you. Create a new project with the same sizes as before (Width: 21cm Height: 29cm). Use a White Background and a Black Foreground colour, then select the Type Tool and start writing your text with a good looking font! You might want to keep the text in the middle of the image, since we will be using clip maps and such later on. Picture 13 is what mine looked like.


Note that I also used the Smudge tool to smear out the text after I created it, making it look a bit older (You don’t need to use the smudge tool though). Save this as “Paper_Text.jpg” when you are finished.

Okidoki, all texture maps have been created, so lets use them in Lightwave! You can close down Photoshop now if you want to.