Creating a Wet and Muddy Rocks Texture with Filter Forge Photoshop plugin

Adding Components to the Work Area

And now you have successfully connected your first two components. The preview window at the top left corner of the screen will show a preview of the selected component. Click on each of the two components and the preview will be displayed. Also, each time you click on a component, that component’s settings are displayed at the left of the screen. Keep an eye on that window always!

As you can see, the Result rectangle has five settings. The first two are the most important because they control the Surface color and the relief (Height) of the texture. Every component that ends up linked to the Height parameter, will be shown as a relief. Very much alike as an emboss but better and more realistic.

The other settings of the Result rectangle are related to the texture’s reflection properties.

Constructing the relief of the texture

So, now we have to start tweaking the Stones and start adding more components to build our wet and muddy rock ground texture.

As you can see in the current state, the rocks have no roughness, they are totally flat like a crystal surface. The best way to add a rock alike roughness is to mix this Stones texture with a Perlin Noise texture, commonly known as Clouds effect.

From the same list that we selected the Stones, double click on the Perlin Noise icon and it will appear on the working area. Move that rectangle to the right of the Stones rectangle. Then, clicking on the green arrow, connect it to the Noise setting of the Stones component. It is hard to explain in written words, but it is very easy to do. You will also have to start panning and zooming in or out the work area to work with the components diagram.

Next, select from the components list the Controls subcategory, and a list of Controls will replace the list of the Noise components. Then, double click on the Slider icon and place it below the Perlin Noise. Check the images below to see how they should be connected and the settings you have to enter for each component.

Now click on each component and enter the settings you see in the image below:

In the Stones settings you can see that two of the controls are replaced with the following references: "Mapped with Noise" and "Controlled by scale". This is the way Filter Forge shows when a setting is connected to a component.

Select the Slider, name it Scale, enter 81 in the Value field and leave Use Remapping unchecked.

But, why do we use Controls such as Sliders if we can enter that value in each component’s settings window?

Just because each time you use a Control component you are telling Filter Forge to show that control in the finished filter interface. This way you can decide which parameters the users can modify when using your filter.

In this case, we are making the rocks scale parameter adjustable by the end user. If you don’t want that, then delete the Slider component and enter 81 directly in the Scale parameter of the Stones component.

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