...and neither does Vue4 (or any app outside of Poser) for that matter. I know that Poser 4 (excluding propack) and earlier don't support JPG as a bumpmap, but those versions will convert JPGs. Don't mean to whine too much, but can MP providers give us the .JPGs as well as the .BUMs (at least as an option), or is there a way to get from .bum to .jpg (I know this must have been asked ad infinitum, but humor me please :) ) This isn't intended to sound ungrateful to the merchants here at Rendo, it's just a kinda peeve as I don't understand the bum format (this may be due to stupidity on my part) and don't do my renders in Poser. Thanks for any help.

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Aw thanks Raven :) I've stayed on an old version of Vue4 for a long time, but I'll go to the most recent patch and see what happens. But for more general utility (especially for editing the bumpmaps) I'd hope for more support for JPG (an odd choice in itself since it's an inherently lossy format, but...)

Mmmmmm, bummer. (sorry, just had to)

Personaly when I see a bum file in any download I open the CR2/PP2/Pz2 and edit it out. Unfortunatly I still only have Win98SE with on an 850PIII so the files load much easier WithOut bum files and I can add them when I am finally ready to render. This also helps tame the issue of "500+ megs worth of bum files on my HD" =8( I once ran into a download that had a 30meg Bum file!! Let's see what was that.....MilDragon I believe?!? I too like to have the JPGs and convert when I need them and store when I don't. THANK YOU P5!!!!

bum files are very huge for, imho, nothing... i found a dirty trick that "seems" to work when i need a bumfile (in my packages or for personnal use). First i convert the grey/jpg picture that is supposed to be a bumpmap into a .bum file. Then i convert the .bum into jpg back, and i edit the CR2 to call this jpg instead of the original bum. easy and seemed to work in poser 4 PErsonnaly i prefer a 35kb jpg than a 2.5mb bum for same information, especially if it loads the same !

Riddokun - I'm gonna give your "dirty trick" a try. If it really works that would be a big boon to me. I've never understood why there was this different bumping format anyway and why they end up being so huge. Say, something just occurred to me. Riddokun, what do you use to convert the bum to jpg? I don't recall that any of my graphic programs accept .bum to load and resave as another format (jpg). ?

Photoshop even has an "Open as...", tell it BMP in the type box and click directly on your .BUM (oo-er!).

ah yes, I forgot they're bmps. That explains their large size... Thanks folks, I'm definitely gonna give the technique a try.

Well, sad to report but the .bum opened as a .bmp in Photoshop and saved as a jpg produces the ashy, sooty look that a regular greyscale jpg produces... I had a feeling as it hasn't come up before now, that it was too good to be true. Ugh, I hate 43MB bump files - I don't want Poser 5 so I guess my bumped images will be ones where I import the figure into another program and use the jpg for bump as it should be.

interesting, Illusions. Certainly worth a try - if only to see the difference in file size between 256 and 16mil. Thanks.

I use bum maps on a regular basis, yet not one of mine is above 1Mb. It's simply a case of taking a bum into PSP (or PS) and increasing the contrast, then decreasing the colours to 16 colours (4bit) and saving (using the 'save' function NOT 'save as'). It's all that is needed for a bum file to be Mb decreased. I really wish more merchants would do that. It's such a waste of space having 40Mb bum files when it's not necessary. And you can simply rename from bum to jpg if you don't use an older version. Greyscale it and it's a perfectly usable bump map.

Well, I personally do not ship the bum files with my product. Just the greyscale jpg's. 1. People who like to use my products with Pro Pack, Poser5 or any other application do not need them, but they need the jpg's! 2. If you use Poser 4, you can convert them yourself or let Poser do the job (not recommended on PC because of a Poser bug). I explain how to do this in the readme. All this keeps the product small and saves download size and time.

yes but the point of ou frend was that after letting Poser 4 convert all those grey jpg he has something like 1 or 2 gb worth of .bum files, while simple grey scale images could have done the same thing. So i dunno for poser propack or 5 (dont have them) but for poser4, the trick of forcing a cr2 to read a greyscale jpg seems to offer the best results...

The .bum variant of .bmp sure is odd though - they seem to have only red and green channels? Wonder why.

There is a thread here that explains how to make bum maps. Forgot where. Take a greyscale pic. Fill the blue channel with Black. Emboss the green channel with 90. Emboss the red channel with -30. I'm no expert on Photoshop, but maybe this process is reversable for one channel. Then desaturate to get the grayscale pic again.

hm so contrary to what the manual say, you cannot hope any good result using a real gray scale image then ? they tell the clear is raised and the dark is pushed... but so it does not read correctly, if i understood what you say, and the trick about calling grey jpg with a modified cr2 is useless ? You still can convert the .bum file poser get fro convertign your grayscale, into a jpg, and call it by foerce in the cr2 and this jpb will have the same color informations than the bum so it may use it correctly, ney ?

The grey scale specifies relief (how raised or recessed the surface is) but Poser converts that into edge information (this is paraphrasing _Dodger): Poser 4 stores the results in a BUM file, Poser 5 and Pro Pack just do it in memory, storing only the greyscale relief map on disc. Like 3ddave I've had mixed results with converting BUM to JPG. (Incidently, once you load a JPGed BUM into Poser 4 with a MAT file it continues to appear on the material list for bumps, so you can assign it to other figures, you don't have to create a new MAT file for every combination as usually stated.)

Theoretically (though I don't think anyone has done it), one could easily make a NULL MAT pose, wherein you'd load a Null loader, then apply a MAT pose to that NULL loader and load in a whole bunch of JPEG BUMs (or other BUMs, if you wanted). That would put all that stuff in your dropdown menu for selection and not clutter up a 'real' figure with material blocks that don't exist in the figure.