Making a texture

When painting a texture in a paint program I need to know are you supposed to make 3 maps , color, spec, and bump maps then load them into Blender or are you supposed to make one make a color map with spec and bump as layers then saving it as one map.

digiman:confused::confused:

I would suggest that you create the maps as layers for easy of painting and save them as your master file for later editing if needed. Then make one layer at a time visible and save it in the file format you want, and repeat for other layers. This gives you the best of both methods.

I am not following you. are you saying that it is best to load seperate maps in blender or just the one map that has layered?

digiman

When you apply texture, you can use a single texture image for color, bump, spec and so on, but that’s not usually what you want. Blender doesn’t recognize separate layers in an imported image, just the final image. In one texture slot, load an image for color, in Map To press the COL button. In another texture slot, load another image for your bump map, press the NOR button. And so on.

ReeVee’s talking about techniques for using your paint program. Since you have to make a single layer image for Blender to use, if you save all the layers separately in a Gimp or Photoshop file, you can go back and easily change things if your Blender render goes south.

I usually make a separate Gimp file for color, bump, spec and so on, to help me stay organized. Besides, layers use memory, and I’d rather use the limited memory on my old dog of a desktop to make larger canvases to paint on with fewer layers, rather than smaller canvases with many layers.