Hi guys,

I've hit a small snag. I've imported my dinosaurs into my scene as .OBJs without many problems. However, when I render even on highest quality the bumps dont look very good, almost pixilated in appearance. They look fine in Maya so I'm not sure whats happening. How can I fix this? Thanks,

Will.

Hi Will,

Check to see that BiLinear Interpolation is enabled for the bump bitmaps.  Go into the material, and right-click to enter the function editor and then select the "Projected Texture Map" node of the bump map.  Make sure BiLinear Interpolation is selected.

It's already set to bilinear, what else might cause it? Thanks for the tip though.

Will,

Can you post a small pic of the bumps in maya versus those in Vue.  Perhaps if we see it, we can suggest some other improvements.  Here are some other things to check:

1. Render settings: are you using texture filtering, what are your texture AA setttings

2. Did you try inverting the bump depth - for example, if the depth is set to 0.5 try setting it to -0.5 and see if this makes a difference

3. I assume you are using Object Standard mapping for the bump map material - yes?

Thanks for that! I've played around with the settings in your first point and it's improved greatly. Almost done, deadline on friday - eek!!

I've had to crank AA up high for bump image maps.  Maybe there is a setting for Vue to leave images as they were imported and not mess them up by default?

That would be nice wouldn't it. They were a real mess in the first few closeup renders. They look fine now though, thanks for your help once again :-D!

My stuff is for Poser, and as you've found the solution to your actual problem, but my Poser Optimization tutorial does hold a few points that apply in general for importing figures, .pz3 or obj, that maybe of use toyou, link is in my signature :)

Another thing though is when bump maps images are too small in size you get .jpg artifacts showing, damn I hate that, which is why I always keep copies of originals of textures, so I can use big originals for bump/displacements if necessary.

I've found that TGA files get left alone by Vue more than JPG.  For some reason, Vue wants to compress JPG files even further during import.  And BMP's are too big RAM-wise to be using.

I've been playing with Infinite Vue 7.51's bumps and found a way that works once again:

The secret is to use a low value of 0.1 for small objects around a foot or two in size. A value of 1 is for use on larger objects that could be 50ft or more in size. Bilinear interpolation should be used on bump texture maps. A "-" sign will invert the bumps.

The "-" sign was broken in some instances before.