In a bump map which is high white or black. [SOLVED]
AbnerK
Posts: 718
Hi,
I was looking at different bump maps and some are posative and some are negative. What is the right way to do it on Genesis 8? In other words for a Genesis 8 figure which bits should be white and which black on the skin?
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I've edited this because it seems some people think you can white high and black high on the same map which seems to make no sense.
Thanks.
Post edited by AbnerK on
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Comments
Whichever way suits the look you want, if you are using it for depressions in the skin then you want a negative effect or if you are adding relief then a postiive, or you may want both. White is whatever the maximum value is, black is the minimum value; since there are only 256 steps you don't want to waste any of that range by always using the same values and just limiting the tones used to control how much relief/indentation there is.
So, white is always a possitive effect?
Thanks Richard.
White is always the Maximum value - I'm not sure it matters for bump, but the Maximum can certainly be a negative value (and with displacement that would shrink the whole model).
that's still be a posative bump though, where the highest parts of the bump are 50% grey. I'm talking about where the creator has 'decided' that the highest parts of model are the same colour as the lowest parts of the model because they were the tonal values of the image used to create the bump map. That is, the nipples shouldn't be the exact same tone as the navel, just because in reality, in full colour the material is drak on the nipple and dark, because of shadow, on the navel. That's obviously just very poor craftsmanship. I wouldn't have known that had someone not mentined it in passing so i looked in my library and, probably, more bump maps had dark nipples and navels than the right way. You may as well just delete those bump maps. I'd say the majority of the bump maps in my library for people are just a black and white version of the base map, some have been inverted most not, some have been made almost black, some made lighter. Very few seem to pay attention to what the bump is actually for, it's like they have just relied on the natural shadow to do the job and not even understood what's happening. No wonder I was confused. A tiny minority have inverted parts and not others. I'm talking about male toros in general. This
Image removed
is one of the few exceptions.
Simply desaturating the diffuse map is not the right way to make a bump map.
Please don't post maps.
Yes, some people to just use a modified diffuse map - I agree it's annoying, though trying to maka a proper bump to match a photo-based texture is an extremely tricky task (there are tools that claim to help, but a lot of those I've seen are essentially guessing from the tonal range too).
To obtain a quick & dirty bump map, applying an 'Embossed' filter (in a graphics package) to the diffuse map can lead to a fairly useful bump with little effort. To get better than that tends to take time. Found it out by accident a long time ago while still using Poser4.
Regards,
Richard.
The emboss indents the nipples though due to them being darker than the skin? Although it does also do a good job of indenting the navel. Anyone else have any other tips on how to generate a bump map?
yeah, TBH, I've never seen a bump map that was obviousy made like that, It seems a bit of an odd way, but, it's obvious a lot of artist and some PA;'s here simply turn the base colour grayscale.
...
... bit of a moan about Google AI ...
It depends. Usually artists tend to "bake" the bumps in the diffuse texture, this also happens inevitably if they use photos as base. In this case desaturating the diffuse to get the bump is perfectly legit and correct.
seriously, my initital question was essentially which is high, white or black. I should have worded it better and will edit. but, if it makes no difference and you can have white high in parts and black high in others then what's the point in a map. It's just so bleedin obviously stupid to say you can take a scan of multi toned object and use that as the bump map without any alterations. I've had to put a lot of time into fixing bump maps from lazy PA's it's just not on. If you're one of those PA's let me know so I can avoid your products.