Bumpmaps?
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hey, amybe im blind, but where are some links for bumpmaps? i want to start using them for rendering and i cant find them anywhere. im specificly looking for podium stuff, if that makes any difference (im a n00b at bumpmaps, what can i say)
more importantly, whats the easiest way to get a bumpmap into your model?thanks,
igor -
Igor, generally people produce their own bumpmaps.
All a bump map is is a grayscale picture which tells the rendering software information about the surface to which it is applied. Specifically the very small details of a surface that would typically be vry hard to model by hand. This can be things like brick walls, where the bricks are raised, plaster walls, carpets etc. Bear in mind that there is a limit to the bumpiness you can achieve.
To produce a bump map for podium, all you have to do is open your original texture in an image editor and then turn it in to a greyscale image. You can do this in 2 ways (that i know of.) Either set the colour system to greyscale or use a desaturate tool to remove the colours. You can then play around with the brightness/contrast/levels in the image to get a suitably distinctive image.
The next step is to save the image, for this you must save the bump map in the same folder as the original texture with the name "originl_bump3" . The number represents the scale of the bumpiness with 1 being smooth and 5 being bumpy.
I'll post a few example pics in a bit.
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Ok, so here is the original texture:
and here is its bump map:
One more point, the darker sections in a bump map will be raised higher than the light bits.
Here you can find a few materials with bump maps, courtesy of the good people at the podium forums.
EDIT: jus doing a bit of reading on rendering and i realised that the adrk bits of bumpmaps are depressed and the light bits raised.
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thus you'll have to make the greyscale image a negative of the regular image
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Well, Justin, it often depends. With a brick wall and light mortar, you would create a negative but when the kmortar is darker, you can leave it like that.
Actually to create a really good bumpmap, you need to tweak that image a lot more. What Remus posted, has darker and lighter areas and the wood board bumped with it would seem not to be well sown at the minimum. But basically this is the method.
If you wish, you can Google for "Crazy Bump" which is a beta tool for generating and tweaking bumpmaps (and specular maps and displacement maps and all those funky ones not even mentioned here).
Also, the folks at the Podium forums have shared a bunch of them as well as have a nice collection of material site links (like we do, too) some of which contains bump and/or specular maps with the texture diffuse maps. Look around a little bit and you will find a lot I bet.
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