Quote:
Originally Posted by Sefiriot
That turned out much better than I expected! Wow. So Katsunami, your advice in making ornaments is basically keep it simple, bold lines-- little to no shading or at least have it pretty light and even?
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The ornament will need to be converted to black and white or more accurately, grayscale. The darker the color, the stronger the embossing will be. If you want an ornament that really stands out, make it all black on a white background, using no greys. Bump mapping and embossing (an emboss is actually a basic bump map) relies in light and shadow, nothing more. White and black is of course the biggest contrast you can achieve, and thus the embossing will be strongest.
As I posted earlier: Imagine that you have a piece of leather, and a huge stamp. This stamp doesn't have ink on it, but it has an image carved on top of it. Then you smash the stamp down into the leather. If you do it on the front, you'll get a recessed image. If you do it on the back, you get a raised image.
This is what bump mapping / embossing basically does. It raises or lowers part of the image (cover) based on a greyscale stamp (ornament). Because it is just raised or lowered, there is no color used to display the ornament; only light and shadow.
So, if your ornament has a lot of very thin lines, there won't be much to lower or raise; there won't be much light or shadow, maybe only a few (or even one) pixel wide. All of that detail will get lost in a small cover after resizing. If you have a very dark cover, you won't see anything: compare, you can't throw a shadow on a black wall either. If you have a cover with a lot of colors and structures, you won't see anything either, because the light and shadows are getting dispersed.
So in short, yes: don't make ornaments TOO detailed and stick to black and white, and when putting them onto covers, use a cover that is not too dark, and does not have too much structure or too much color.
You see I keep saying "not too much": obviously, you can have detail in the ornament, you can have structure or color in the cover, but don't overdo anything.