So I’m doing this shakespeare caricature. I’m starting to put a bump map on his face to accentuate his wrinkles and thats where the problem starts.
While I have mipmap filtering on you could barely see it, even though I had it up to 25 and 5 contrast. I’'ve turned mipmap off, and you can see them, I just feel a bit funny switching mipmaps off.
How do people normally use bump maps in blender?
Good work!!
Bump mapping is not the best way to go in Blender. What most people do, is to create the bump map, such as you did, but then opening it in Gimp or Photoshop and applying the Normal map Filter to create a normal map. Normal maps are the way to go for an accurate result during the rendering. Besides, you can also get a nice preview of the effect of the normal map in GLSL mode, while that is not possible with simple grayscale bump maps.
Very good job!
No need to apply the filter in Gimp, you can do it straight in Blender. Just apply the bump map to the material and make a baking of the normals.
I don’t know what the problem is, but I just wanted to say I like the caricature! It’s disconcerting though that he doesn’t have pupils. Really like it though.
Simply decrease the Filter size in Map Image Panel from 1.000 to 0.01 (or something similar) and that should do the trick.
Is that true Enrico??? That’s great, I didn’t know about that trick!!
Hi Env,
Baking the normals sounds interesting. I’m not very clued up on normal maps though. I gave it a go and got this. This was on “tangent normal space” and select to active is on.
The lines you can see on the model are my uv seams
Jpbouza: yessss! We used that trick a lot in Peach. 
Tmcthree: tangent normal space is ok, btw no need for the “select to active” option if you use the same mesh for the baking. And, if the normals don’t show that much, try to increase the bump value in the texture panel and do the baking again.
still can’t get the normal maps to work, Don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Anyway moving on started experimenting with expressions. Really like the way blender does it, with the pose library and all that…
These are pretty rough, I was messing around with the nmaterials on the teeth and eyes so they look a bit odd, hey ho.
BTW anybody know of a free flipbook jpg/anim player?
One thing with the whole bump / normal map thing is texture size vs render resolution. If you have a 4096px map and are rendering out a surface that is only 600 or so pixels wide on the final image, the map gets sampled down a lot and the fine details get lost pretty quickly.
As a pretty good rule of thumb I’d try to keep the textures twice the width of the final size they appear in the render, especially if you are working towards one still image. (Animation is a little different if you want to zoom in and out on a character or something.) This means there is enough texture to get properly sampled, but not so big that the small details get washed out.
Cheers Ben.
I’m a bit confused about the baking the bump map to be a normal. Why will using a baked bump map look that much better than a bump map?
“baked bump map look that much better than a bump map?” - that would look the same.
A normal map is different to a bump map, as it stores data with three colours for three directions. Bump map works with intensity of grey - ie one direction. Blender doesn’t handle the bump maps very well on the sides of objects because of this, but it handles normal maps just fine. Hence, normal maps are generally better.
There would be more technical answers out there, but the short answer is to use normal maps if you can.
Sorry I meant, a bump map which was baked as a normal map.
