Hey All, Was wondering if I could get some advise from those farther along than I am. I am working on a texture, and I was creating the Bump Map. I (In Photoshop) Converted to grayscale and inverted the image. When applying the bump map, I get the following issues in P5. At 100%, looks like some creature fom the black lagoon (hmm, idea...) even at 50% and 25% the skin surface is still pretty bad. I get the desired effect around 6-8%. However I get all these wierd black dotted lines. (2 pics on right) Am I doing something wrong to have to have the Bump Strength so low, and still get those dots? Also if the Bump map were to be used in P4, would the problem only be worse? Any Ideas? Cheers, Drezz

You could try smoothing the bump map and see how that looks, it will take out quite a lot of the dots, but It might also take out some details that you want to keep.

I (In Photoshop) Converted to grayscale and inverted the image ...is there some particular reason you inverted the image? For a bump map, darker areas = lower/sunk in and lighter areas = higher/raised up. If you look at the back side of your fingers (knuckles), you'll see that the darker parts of the folds are the sunk-in parts and the tops of the folds are lighter. Same thing with skin-poses. If you 'invert' your texture, you are getting the opposite affect of what you're looking for. Note that there ARE a few types of skin that are typically darker and may also be raised (nipples, moles, viens etc), but those should be treated separately (invert only those areas, but even then, keep in mind that any wrinkles/folds on a nipple, for example, would still follow the initial lighter=raised, darker-sunk, so it's best just to brighten that entire area instead of inverting it). Anyway, this probably has nothing to do with helping the little black spots you're seeing (stewer or someone can probably tell you how to fix those), but I keep running into this 'invert texture to create bumpmap' myth thing and try to help correct that when I can ;).

Same thing with skin-poses should read "Same thing with skin-pores"

Didn't the bump map have to be inverted in Poser4? I thought I read that in a few texturing tutorials, perhaps it's why the myth has been perpetuated. shrug I think a call to the texture tutorial police is in order. Maybe it was just ONE tutorial writer, hellbent on upsetting the whole texture community (and in turn the entire Poser community) from within the system. Under the radar, as it were. What a cunning bugger.

Hehe.. could be. Actually, there is an issue with P4 .bum files, but to correct that problem you have to first create the .bum file (black = low, white = high), then load the .bum file into your paint program, split it into red green and blue channels, invert the green channel only, recombine the channels and re-save it. There's older threads on this topic, but I don't have links handy.

I usually set bump strength to 0.01 in P5, unless you're looking for a special effect. Are you using the P4 render engine? Make sure you tick "Ignore shader trees" in the render options. That should help.

Thanks for the responses. As for the grayscale then invert, thats what i had read a couple of times on the net. I tried just grayscale anf the results are the same. Yeah, I prefer the P4 engine to the fireflaw render engine. Although I may just not be experienced enought to get it to work to my advantage. Oy Vay, Thanks for clearin that up for me.