Snarlygribbly posted at 3:17PM Tue, 24 December 2019 - #4373942

In older shaders, and even some new ones, the same texture is used for both diffuse colour and bump map. Now, the Poser texture manager can only have a single gamma setting for each texture, so one or the other (diffuse / bump) will have the wrong setting.

Interesting! I had never considered that, although it makes sense in hindsight. Thanks @snarlygribbly for the information.

A follow-up question: I admit I sometimes connect the diffuse map to the bump input if there's nothing else available, on the grounds that it's at least better than nothing. Plainly I shouldn't do that any more, but is there a node or nodes I can put in to correct the gamma for the bump input and avoid the diffuse map's gamma being messed up?

I've seen some material set-ups where the creators had put in a maths node (set to just pass through, e.g. multiply by 1), and others use an HSV node to create a monochrome version of the diffuse map, but do either or both of those actually correct the gamma? I know enough about the material room not to take anything at face value...