HOLY HANNAH!! You're WAY overdoing it - no wonder you're confused about this process! ALL you had to click to add your images is Diffuse. I'm gonna make you a quickie tut on this, and give you the textures to work with as well. Should be up in a bit (barring RR server problems) and I'll repost here to direct you to it. -Lew ;-)

Just got back! You CAN have both the blobs and criss-cross bumps if you want. I was just getting you to see for yourself how you can create just the blob bumps. NOW... Here's what you do to adjust the height/severity of the bumps for each particular element you want to control. Open the .psd doc. The less contrasty you make the criss-cross or blobs, the less severe. And, just the opposite, the MORE contrasty, the MORE severe in your renders. Soooo... If you want it to be mostly BLOBS while still seeing criss-cross, click on the blobs layer, Edit>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. Make that puppy more contrasty! Click on the criss-cross layer, do the saem, but make it LESS contrasty. Flatten all, and save as your new bump map. "Ambient Channel"? Don't remember that one in Bryce. There's the Diffuse (or Color - can't remember which it is called in Bryce right now), and then the Bump map, and then an Alpha map that you're not gonna use for this kind of texture. Go to town!

Woohoo! Okay, open the .psd doc and delete the criss-cross layer, flatten, and save w/ a diferent name. NOW, open Bryce, apply the image w/criss-cross as your diffuse/color image, and the one without as your bump image - they should tile correctly, but the only bumps you will see after you hit render will be from the blobs, and not the extensive surface detail of the criss-cross pattern. Get it?

For a moment, don't worry about tiled/non-tiled/etc. Don't think about how it's gonna be "applied". The Galvanized Metal picture - did you save it as a Photoshop doc with the blobs on their own layer, and the criss-cross on its own layer as well?

They do, but they're hidden in the criss cross pattern. If you've saved the image as a Photoshop doc, open it again, delete the criss-cross pattern so you just have "blobs" and flatten and save as a new bump map under a new name. Apply THAT new bump map to your Bryce cube and see what happens. -Lew ;-)

Oh - bump it up to at least 60 in bump (if not 100!) - not gonna notice much under 20. Didn't realize you were setting it that low. Then put a light shining across it's surface (angled so it's to the side of your material casting shadows across the surface) and do a test render. Bump maps don't actually chage REAL height - just the way the surface reacts to light so it APPEARS to have lumps and bumps - saves you from having to make a HUGE polygon count in the model's surface geometry. So, also, you're not going to see anything until you hit "render". To save render times, though, just open a new document, make a cube and apply the texture, and make a side-light. Don't do it in a complicated scene until you like how it reacts.

Actually, MissNancy posed that it sounded like a lottery - Tetsuo211 just wondered if we'd pay an entrance fee to a contest in general.

Great idea! Time to get on it! (puts thinking cap on... nothing happens...)

Congrats Vertecles - you're right - a mystery to many! Great render!

Sure, as long as it was someplace like RR, CGTalk/Society, DeviantArt, Worth1000, etc. Not Joe Schmoe's personal website - "Hey, I'm having a contest with a non-refundable entry fee! 'Just need your credit card number..."

Cool shot! Came out actually pretty crisp! I once saw a cool "painting with light" shot someone did on a set of stairs (college - one of the other students' trial-error testing) - it was pitch black in the house, and they used a flashlight as someone walked down the stairs (stopping and posing their feet for the flashlight). Then after the person was all the way down and out of shot, they painted the walls w/light so that the final looked like a dimly lit stairway with ghosts' feet walking down. Anyone up for starting a thread showing ideas like this? I just read a cute thread on "relaxed" shots, why not painting w/light? Any takers? -Lew ;-)

This is gonna creep ALL of you out, I'm sure: I've had a Nikon D100 for 2 years for my product photography (as well as the occasional event shoot and portrait sittings). I was always careful switching lenses but lets' face it, "dust happens". It had accumulated SO much dust in that time that I was spending more time with the clone tool and healing brush than I was with scanned medium and large format film for my product shots. Soooo.... Based on some basic advice from a friend who still handles the camera repairs at a shop I used to work for, I turned the camera on, activated mirror lockup, and fired the shutter on bulb - holding the shutter release down to be continually open with the filter and CMOS sensor exposed, and shot canned air in there (couple of short bursts - otherwise you might get a "squirt" of liquid coming from the compressed air). About 90 percent of it is gone! Still have to spend a bit of time in Photoshop correcting it, but it's a LOT better now. Going to have it professionally cleaned as soon as I think I'll have a break in shooting, or can get another body to use in the down time. -Lew ;-)