How do you create a Bump map?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

Hello,

I’ve been looking at the demo files for graphics and I’ve come across something that I don’t have any idea of how to create.

I know to create a bump map (at least I think) you need an original image, and then one that has (from what I’ve seen) blue and then purple-ish violet color to produce the ‘bumps’. My question exactly is, how do you create that second odd colored image from the original, is this something you can do with say Photoshop? Or some other software, or something else.

Any help is much appreciated.

#2

yeas, it’s possible with photoshop, there is a plugin from the official nvidia site or something. Another posibility is just to use an image, preferably b/w, with the nor button set in the materials, it’s a similar effect.

#3

I’ve heard about the plug-in, but I was aiming more towards on creating the bump map without plug-ins. So I could do it myself, I found a tutorial, but it still doesn’t clearly define how to create that map.

Thank you any way.

#4

A bump map is simply a Black and White Grayscale image, usually a JPG image. Dark (Black) pixesl render as low areas and white pixels render as high areas (although you can reverse this with the “NOR” button under the “Map To” tab.

Although Photoshop is great, any good image editor will work. Have you tried Gimp??

#5

You can bake normal maps in the current SVN version of Blender. It supports tangent space. Even support for displacement map baking can be found. See http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/render-baking/ for more information.

#6

Here is the link to the Nivida Plugin for making normal maps.


You can also use Gimp with that normal map plugin.
http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/normalmap/#download
If you use Gimp just put all 4 files in plugins folder.
If you need any more info just let us know.

#7

Thanks for all the help. I’m not sure if I can use the plug-in, since I’m using a mac.

Just wondering, but how would you do this in the Game Engine? Is there another process similar to this or is it entirely different?

Such as for example, I have a cube, and I want to add a texture of a crate, how would I make it appear as if the indented areas of the crate appear well, indented?

#8

http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorials/creating_bumpmaps_from_images.htm

Hey do you have Photo Shop on the mac?

#9

Yes.

That tutorial cleared a bunch of stuff up, thanks a lot!

Do you know how to use this with the game engine, I’ve seen it in a few example files with brick walls that have a texture and when played in the game, the highlights come in and you can see where everything seperates. It looks quite real.

#10

Just for the sake of clarity this topic is discussing to things;

“bump map”

“normal map”

As 5_on_it said a “bump map” is a grey-scale image (that more often than not called a “height map” in gaming circles) that ‘displaces’ meshes, game engines generally don’t use ‘bump maps’.

A “normal map” is different kettle of fish as it involve more than just surface ‘displacement’, it’s about light interaction as well as surface fakery. Game engines generally use normal maps.

So… what you’re wanting is actually “normal maps” but I don’t know if the Blender engine (I’m assuming that’s what you’re going to be using) supports them fully? If it does, make sure you colour orientation is the right way around otherwise the effect will appear flipped or inside out; it’s easy to fix in a photo editor, you just ‘flip’ or ‘invert’ a specific colour channel (usually red).

Hope that helps ;o)

#11

Oh okay, thanks that cleared everything up I think.