A happy new year to you all
I was trying to paint some bumps and thought that starting with black and painting grey shades would work. The grey seemed to cause indent and yet the white causes dent- now i'm confused. So looking at the procedural bumps in DTE (by clicking the combination window) it looks far more complicated or am I seeing a partially rendered image of the bump?.

Can you post examples of what you mean?

Start with a mid shade of grey and draw your indents with increasing shades from the base grey to white. If on the other hand you draw decreasing shades of the base grey to black you'll get bumps.

Or, if you have the bump features you like from your painted map but they are reverse the effect, can you not apply the bump with a negative value?

Yes, you can Skiwillgee and that would save you making an innie and an outie...although I think there's something I'm missing here but haven't the time right now to look it up in the bible. Hmmm, something's bugging. In height maps things are reversed.

Bryce has always been backwards when it comes to Bump maps, I have NO idea why they set it up like this from the beggining of Bryce, but after you  bring in your bump map, you have to INVERT it for it to work correctly (white = high areas & black = low areas)

Or, yes, you can apply a negative value to the bump.

AS

And as Quest stated, start with a perfect middle gray value, which is where your Red, Green and Blue all equal 128. (if possible)

Silly that Bryce has always been like this, imho.

I would guess if one only requires the indent bump you could start with white and work down through the grey shades as the bump depth would be based on the relative shades

Advantage?
None, doesn't matter as far as I have ever known.

I would guess if one only requires the indent bump you could start with white and work down through the grey shades as the bump depth would be based on the relative shades

You could, though technically the white would be trying to affect the look of the polys, it might not matter at all.

I am used to starting with a perfect middle gray as I also work create Terrain and Displacement maps and starting with white would not work. Keeping the same rules for all the maps is just easier for me, mentally, lol.

Cool little industrial cap-thing you got going on there.  ;o)

Thanks AS
I think you may be right with the mid grey if only for continuitys sake. The other thing I noticed was when loading the tex you can't just copy and paste to the bump channel you have to go via the alpha - or am I missing something.

On a workflow note
I sprayed these texture directly on the model in (the much underated) metasequoia cause that seems to me easier than trying to work out which poly is where in PSP for example from the exported  UV map. Any tips?

Nah, painting directly onto polys is getting more and more popular/accepted. No tips here, you seem to be doing very well, with some paint scratched off and your dirt stuck into the nooks. Looks great!

I got a lot of help from this tut by Stefan Morrell[

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=373024](http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=373024)

Yeah thats what I'v been doing but if you copy and paste into the window on the right no bump appears

Ohhh…yes, very nice looking grungy thingie Airflamesred. I’ve looked quickly through the Bible and I can’t find any mention as to why reading alpha information should be different between the terrain editor and the texture editor in 2D mode. The terrain editor is more straight forward and intuitive and more in par with other 3D programs in keeping with height map translation protocol.

As for applying texture I would say in this case to get that random arbitrary scattering effect of the dents and scratches it’s best to spray right on the model but for more precise and particular placement for things such as lettering as say a patent logo I would go with the more work intensive method of exporting the uv map to an external image editing program. Yes I’m familiar with this CG-Talk tutorial you link to and I think it’s one of the finest .  He also has this tutorial in PDF format and other free props at his website (download section) which use to have more tutorials but he’s taken them off…sigh.

I’m not sure what you mean by copying directly to the bump channel either. Whenever I try to past an image from clipboard memory into the output channel in the picture lab or the terrain editor it pastes fine but if you mean into the texture lab bump channel it doesn’t paste.

I think you've solved my quandary Quest - it is an output channel rather than me thinking it was going staight to the bump. As in, those 3 windows in pic editor equated to the 3 windows in mat editor - now I see why they don't - thanks.
Direct painting on the oject is far more satisfying I'm in no doubt about that and I'm thinking it is possible to put lettering and many other effects on via metasequoia.

Not at all familiar with Metasequoia or its capabilities and sophistication. Does it allow you to output to uv map also? Most paint-on-model programs do. Most industrial parts have their patents machine pressed on or are casted as raised numbers. That would certainly add more character to this piece which is already looking great. Please keep us posted.

So this final image had a bump taken from the diffuse - magic wand the 256 black spots -change to white = raised dents)- invert  selection, and paint the rest as mid grey. Back into meta to paint shades of black (indents) A slight amount of reflection is taken from this alpha info.
In conclusion You do need to UV map effectively, as you rightly point out but for me painting on the mesh is so much fun.
Thanks to all for the c+c

I especially like those worn edges they are just as you might expect in real life’s wear and tear fashion.