I've created a new texture for the P5 female, and now I want to create a skin bump map for her. Let me just say, I have no idea what I'm doing in the P5 mat room, I read a few tutes and heres what I came up with. I do have a few questions though; 1. Are skin bump maps necessary, do people really want them? 2. Can skin bump maps be applied with a mat pose? 3. Is a skin bump map just a greyscale version of the skin texture? (cuz thats what I've done). I rendered this pic without the texture, so the bump would be fully visible.

here's my mat settings

heres my render settings

I am not knowledgable about P5 a all really but to answer your questions 1. I think skin bump maps are very necessary and can make or break a texture if they are done right. 2. Skin bumps can be aplied with a MAT pose. 3. Skin bump is NOT a greyscale version of the texture. That is sometiems a good astarting point but they really aren't the same thing.If you did that most often the nipples would be indentations in the breast, moles would be pits, etc.White area pop up, black areas receed and often the bump needs to have things reversed in part and detaisl added etc. Right now you seem to be rendering the bump in the texture node but I am not sure. What you should see is a bumpy white texture. I will pop off a render in a sec.

Here is a quickie render of something I was working on. The bump map shows the bumps and that is all. The blue is jsut the lighting and the blown out render is jsut a weird thing for the lighting I was using but I was being lazy. Hope that helps.

Was that rendered in Poser 4? I miss the simplicity of poser 4 bump maps, and the render you've posted looks very good. Thats the kind of effect I want, the render I posted doesn't look like a bump to me, just looks like a black and white version of the texture. Is it possible that anyone could post a link to any relevant tutes or threads? TY :)

Yep .. That is Poser 4. From looking at your settings and all it seems things are plugged intot he displacement node (from my limited understanding) and maybe it should be in the bump node (Not the gradient bump) Good luck

Generally speaking, a bump map would have a lot more fine-grained detail than most painted or "airbrushed" body textures might have, so when this type of texture is used as the bump source the effect is minimal. Some people add a little noise to the bump to give it some grain, but I think that looks like sandpaper, so I prefer a fBm type of detail which gives a look similar to what Ghostofmacbeth has shown above. A photoreal texture that has detail right up to the seams could be a starting point as Ghostofmacbeth suggests, but often works better when a negative (reversed) grayscale version is used as your starting point, and then hand paint fine detail where it might be missing, with careful consideration to what will be raised and what will be recessed.

Hmmm something to consider... the thumb image in his bumpmap looks to be a normal texture map. It should work for both displacement or bumpmapping, but his setting is also VERY low. try setting your displacemtn to .5, and se what happens. Also try plugging it into the bump map node, and seting that at .5 The simplicity of P4 is still there, and everything you can do with P4 you can also do just as easily with P5. Tinker with the material room for a few days, and it'll suddenly be impossible to even consider going back to P4. Also, visit RDNA's stupid poser 5 tricks forums.. you'll learn TONS!

Attention : darker area's like niples and public hair come forward, so the belly button has to be on the white side ...

I think part of your problem is that you have an image map node plugged into your diffuse colour channel but you don't have a map loaded in that node. I suggest you disconnect that node altogether. I suspect it's making Poser confused about what it should use as the colour map. Try disconnecting the bump map from the displacement channel and connect it to the bump channel instead. Set the bump amount to 0.1 initially and then turn it up or down from there until you get results you like. I have a pack of shaders in free stuff which includes some image map based skin shaders. You might like to check those out. There are many ways to do things with P5 materials and there's no particular reason you should use my method, but it might give you a starting point to work from.

Vilters .. Not necessarily .. I know it is reversed on PC in some lighting examples but that is a weird PC glitch that isn't universal. White "should" be high.

"Also, visit RDNA's stupid poser 5 tricks forums.. you'll learn TONS!" can you give me a URL? I couldn't find that forum, unless you're talking about the Poser 5 forum on RDNA.

incredibl sources to learn (I'm a(cough) dedicated student myself) are: -Ajax' materials from frestuff (thanks again for that generous gift!) -FallenCity, inluding many by Dr.Geep -Dr.Geep here at R. -http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/index.html here may be others but these will keep you busy for a few weeks...

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=76734

Try this one for RDNA. There's a tute of mine at FallenCity too, but I don't think it has anything about bump. Ronstuff has some great stuff on bump in the RDNA thread linked above.