Stacy's Pink Ocean Sale and a Sequin Brush

Alice's Collections has marked down some of the clothes from Stacy's Pink Ocean as part of their Spring Promotions. I love her clothes (they are very well made) and especially her ability to choose and mix patterns and textures. It's worth a visit just to look at the photos, and there are 113 items to look at :D Now that I have run out of room for resin, it makes sense to actually buy the poor dolls some clothes. I have been using the fabric I have here for design ideas for virtual fabric, so it has slowed down my already glacial sewing; it's much easier to photograph cloth textures when the fabric is flat, than when it is sewed into something!

I did manage to make something with just a photoshop brush--sequins!

If you open up this render so you can see the detail better, the bow on the black and white shoe has clear sequins on it. And this is how they are made:

First you make a simple brush:

I think if you screen grab this, you can take it into Photoshop and select it, and "define brush".

The default is black, but I made the brush white and put it on an empty layer; above a black layer; above my "fabric," to make both the heightmap and the "this is shiny" map. I use Photoshop's File/ Save As choice to make a .jpg screen capture of my layered .psd:

Then I hid the black layer, and then used an adjustment layer to color the sequins. Having the color on a separate layer from the sequins lets you make them any color-- so you can re-use the maps, slotting in other fabrics underneath. Layers are awesome. Here is the .jpg I made using the colored sequins and the fabric:

Then I took it into poser and put it on a blank square. I had to add a cheat map for reflection, but other renderers (including Daz Studio) don't need this. Here's the finished sequin fabric:

The scale is a little off, but you can see how it looks. The map was 1024 pixels across so pushing it up to 4096 (standard gaming size), would make the 60 pixel brush proportionately smaller and in better scale--and since the sequins aren't attached to the fabric image, it's easy to scale things up and down.

And this is where all my time has gone :D