I am very new to Blender and was playing around with different materials and textures the last few hours. At the moment, I try to (well, better: try to learn to) use bumpmapping, because in many tutorials I read what wonderful things it can do to your pictures, how easy it is to create depth, how wonderful blahblahblah. And. Well. I am very disappointed. My results look very, very poor. To be honest, I just don’t see any difference compared to a “plain” texture.
Here is what I did:
Create a mesh (i.e. a sphere).
Created a new material and a new texture (let’s say "clouds).
Switched back to the material-buttons and hit the “Nor” button.
Pressed F12 to render my nice little bumby sphere, covered with soft bumps and small hills, a nice 3D effect, etc…
But: The only difference I realize is the preview in the material buttons window on the left…The rendered pictures look pretty much the same. No bumps, no depth… :((
What am I doing wrong? Any ideas?
Here are some examples, one time with “Nor”, on with “inverted Nor” and one without “Nor”. Do you guys see any difference?
there is a little slider near the nor button ( make sure you press the nor button on the far right btw, there are two of them. the one on the right is the one you need.) take that slider that says ‘nor’ and crank it up. that should do it.
I used the correct “Nor” button on the right side and increased the “Nor” slider step by step. Now I am at the maximum of 5, but still don’t recognize any difference…
PS: The texture and size of the sphere may look something different, because I didn’t save the .blend file above and had to re-construct this complex scene
PPS: Which material did you choose? I will try to render the same image and post the result…
I think they are all more or less affected by the nor button,…some more than others. But if you want a really good bump map, the image texture is the way to go.
Awwww… like I said b4, I read some tutorials, but NONE said, that bumpmapping can only be used with Stucci or Noise.
I tried Stucci, and now I have what I wanted to see…a wobbling purple ball…
But, how can I create the illusion of 3d, depth, shade, etc. with other materials, “real” textures? E.g. I want to design a table. This table is made out of single boards and so I give it a pretty wood-texture (type: image) which looks nice, but veeery flat (without gaps or little holes between the single boards). Is there a chance to give a little (3D-) “structure”?
If you are using an image texture for the wood, same thing. just click nor and adjust the slider. It will work provided the texture has enough contrast. If not, you can adjust the contrast of the texture, save it under a different name, load it as your second texture ( you can have up to 14 for every object I believe) and turn the nor on, and click the ‘col’ button off. that way it will only act as a bump map, and not affect your original wood texture. Also, if you really want a procedural to work as a bump map, and it’s not working very well, render it, maybe jack up the contrast, or use the ‘threshold’ function in GIMP or photoshop or whatever) and then load the rendered image as the bump map. I believe that should work.
You get bump mapping effects with clouds, marble, wood, and even blend textures but the effect is weaker than for stucci and noise. And the weakest of all is clouds. Hence your problem.
That you have bump mapping on your spheres you can see at the transition from bright to the dark halfs.
For the floor texture follow Modron’s advice or just hit the nor button.
Bumpmapping can be very sensitive to the lighting in cases.
