Bump map testing, may be useful for other beginners

Support Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
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Hi

I feel a little presumptuous posting a thread offering any kind of help when I’m so new at this! Hope its okay?

I’ve been experimenting with bump maps, and watched a number of tutorials, but I couldn’t see if I was doing it right. I decided that what would work for me was removing any trace of a ‘proper’ texture and just seeing if I could make a bump map effect a change on my project. What I did was to create in photoshop an image with a plain green colour fill and export that as a .png. I put that on a simple plane as an image texture, and rendered it to check it was just a flat colour.

Then I created a fill layer with 50% grey over that (as I believe with a bump map neutral grey is defined as ‘flat’), over which I put a black and white copy of the blender logo and the word blender. Hope this was okay with the foundation for this purpose as I know it’s copyright, then exported that as a png and used it as the bump map image. My reasoning being that anything I could see on the surface of the plane was going to be a result of the bump map.

Worked a treat, and I could see what effect changing the settings was having on the final result easily.

I’ve attached both the image files and the .blend file to this post - while I know for texturing old hands this is obvious, but it might help any newbies like me :slight_smile:

Attachments

blenderBump.blend (546 KB)

blenderBump.png1024×1024 15.5 KB

allGreen.png1024×1024 222 Bytes

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  1. For a demonstration keep the scene simple. no need for a camera, and also dont Rotate the plane. keep it in the center, and with scale applied.

  2. If you are going to have a solid green color, then dont use an image texture for it. use the color picker included, as the texture contains data for every pixle, while a solid color from within blender is… well just a solid color. also you have the ability to change it later.

  3. Pack all external data into the blend file before giving it to others. we do not get the textures included in the blend scene, meaning we have to download them separately.

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also this is not a request, i will have this thread moved to Tutorials, Tips and Tricks as you are not asking for any help.

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Just a minor correction… Bump maps don’t represent depths, displacement maps do. In bump maps, the pixel value alone doesn’t represent anything; just the difference of value between the neighbouring pixels is used to determine the final normal in relation to the original normal.

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Moved from “Materials and Textures” to “Tutorials, Tips, and Tricks”

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Thanks for moving it :slight_smile: