How to make bump map

[leninsankaralingam]

I wish to know from anybody that how to make a bumpmap .

 

Thank you!

[Stephen Thomas]

Photoshop? (or equivalent). The main thing is to think about what areas you want to stand out or push back, there's a little more thought required than just desaturating your diffuse map if you want to create a good effect.

[leninsankaralingam]

yes my friend , I can manage with bumpmaps little bit. but I want to make a good normal map (for ex. normal map for a brick wall).

[jinsley]

Google for Ndo... I have been using that for normal and it has been working great.

[Gary Ledgerwood]

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

[mfured20]

I have never messed with normals before, does it really make that much of a difference?

 

Thanks for the links by the way, I will look into these.

[Stephen Thomas]

I think normal maps are really best used when they are created from actual geometry. Using the Nvidia plug-in on a diffuse map is still expecting the software to guess the relative depth based on edges and brightness values, which can give an incorrect result. Best option for brickwork would be to paint a displacement map for the grout and combine this with a bump map for the brick face based on a desaturated diffuse map with reduced contrast.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

If done correctly, they are quite a bit nicer than bumps. The 'normal' in a normal map is a color that corresponds with a direction, allowing it to better analyze light that is coming from that direction, and creates a better looking and more believable highlight/reflection/specular reflection on the material compared to a bump map.

 

I typically use the nDo one mentioned above, but if you have the money, this looks like it is far more interactive and has far more options...

http://www.crazybump.com/

[Dave Buchhofer]

nDo is truly awesome.

 

adjustable paintable normal maps, and adjustable layering of effects. i use it all the time.

 

Crazybump is good if you're coming from texture reference or to get a nice base to work with. another alternative to that is xNormal, free'er, but not quite as easy to use.

 

I'm sort of still cheating on crazybump, using an old old beta from when he first was developing it... someday i'll need to buy that heh!

[Nilla]

If you use Photoshop to make bump maps you just open the image file for the texture you want to bump, and go to image - mode - grayscale. Then go to adjustments - levels, and use the sliders to get the contrast between black and white, you want to remove as much gray as you can inbetween for a good bump map. Then you just save and import it into your 3d application and connect it to the surface material alongside your color map. If your image has a red, green and blue channel you are better off selecting a specific channel a lot of the time for a better result.

 

A bump map doesn't offer true surface relief and therefore it has some disadvantages; it doesn't cast or recieve shadows and you can't render silhouette but on the other hand it's fast to render so depending on what you're rendering you get away with it most of the time. I use Maya and in cases where I need true surface relief I use displacement, but it's a lot slower to render.

 

Normal maps are used to display an illusion of high-res geometry on low-res geometry. You can make them by modeling something very detailed like a brick wall with actual geometry and then baking this information into a normal map which you assign to a low-res model to display as high-res but allowing it to render much faster. So the main reason for using normal maps is rendering times, this is why they're very common in real time applications like games. In a normal map you can also include additional surface information, such as the bump info.

 

There's lots of ways and software to do this, but this is the way I do it.

 

Cheers,

Nilla