I know this sounds stupid, but here is the question. I know P5 with firefly etc, renders better than P4. Sooo... can P5 make P4 products look better by rendering them in firefly? or do you have to render P4 stuff in P4 mode? I'm just talking about rendering, not any other special P5 options. Am I making any sense? :oP

lol none whatsoever ;) the answer tho is yes it will make poser4 stuff look better & p4 mode will have things look the same as they do now. Rob

ps RDNA posted at least 1 pic of Vicky done with the firefly renderer& she did look a lot better. Rob

One caveat... from skimming through the rendering section in the P5 manual, it appears that Firefly will NOT support P4 bump map (.bum) files.

So bump mapped figures will be stuck with the P4 renderer, unless you also have the source file (e.g. .jpg) to plug into the Firefly material editor.

(I don't know why this is... is there no way to convert a .bum back into a straight grayscale image file? What the heck IS a .bum, anyway?)

AFAIK .bum is actually the same format as .bmp. If you rename it to *.bmp you can open it in a paint program and convert to greyscale.

Rob Do you recall the gallery and name of the image of the RDNA post of the vicky P5 render? I tried looking, but no luck.

PS I'm going to try that .bum>.bmp>greyscale>jpg

The BUM (gradient map) to BMP (bump map) isn't actually direct, although you will get some sort of approximation by a straight greyscale conversion. Someone has written a convertor, however, but the escapes me, a search for "bum" should find it mentioned in a recent thread. Bill

The word "conversion" got lost somewhere in the first part of my last post. The Vicky renders are in the P5 gallery of RDNA.

If a .bum is really just a grayscale .bmp, why the heck doesn't CL support it in Firefly? They've clearly gone to a lot of effort to support P4 figures and props... why would they skimp on something that'd take 10 minutes to code and test? Why make everyone RENAME every .bum file they own to .bmp?

If the conversion is more complicated, though (e.g., Bill's post that an "indirect" conversion process is required), it might make a little more sense. But if someone else could write a conversion program, surely CL could.

Hmm.

But I've got a couple of packages that came with both .bum and .jpg source files for the bumps... as well as some that have only .jpg requiring Poser to convert on the first load. So it wouldn't be too hard to compare the source and result...

that's a simple question to aswer dbutenhof, it's cause they have something 100 times better than bum mapping now, they have displacement mapping. Rob

I remember I there were problems with Propack regarding *.bum & jpg's you had keep Poser4 & Propack both on board, and use Poser4 to convert jpg's to bum.

.bum isn't grayscale, unless you think of that sickly shade of green as gray. If you look at a .bum, you'll also see that the format has something of an embossed effect, which is why converting a .bum directly to a greyscale bitmap doesn't produce quite the intended results.

I got the bum/bmp equivalency from another thread, don't remember where, but the thread was dealing with the way some bum bump-maps show things indented rather than elevated, and the fix given was to retitle the *.bum to *.bmp, take it into photoshop and invert the green channel, then save and rename back to *.bum.

Hmm. I gave it a try. Both Photoshop and GIMP claim the renamed .bum file isn't a valid bmp and refuse to open it. That's not to say some image programs might not be more forgiving, but at the least it's not a completely "kosher" bmp.

True, there apparently are some minor differences. Paint Shop Pro will read many renamed .bums as .bmp, but still has problems with a few.