Okay, first, if you don't already know this from following my or others' explorations of bumpmap stuff, including the great Bumpmap fiasco wherein Poser 4 for PC does them wrong, my Tron lines magic BUMs, and my JPEG compressed BUM stuff, a BUM file is just a 24-bit Windows bitmap with a different extension. (I recently tried to hack my registryto make it show up as such even, but I got lost. Bloody Windows ME) Anyhoo... Well, I was reading the Great Bumpmap Fiasco thread and saw how my bumpmaps were all wrong. Normally a bit hard to tell, actually, but hey. Anyway. I have noticed some oddity, however, from time to time, where it seemed the wrong edge was lit. In a pattern, though, it can be hard to tell if you're just imagining it. So I went ahead and tried the invert-green trick and found that it worked fine, except that the whole thing was SDRAWCKAB. Black was high, which it's never suppoed to be. There's an easy way around this, though. Set the bump level to -100% and viola, you have an inverted version, so the invert-green seems to work as long as you also invert the map itself. But, i thought. that's too simple. Not enough for me! I'm a hacker at heart and I had to see what I could do WITHOUT Poser's dubious help. I made a bumpmap of my own by hand. I don't mean a greyscale bumpmap, I mean the green-red contents of a BUM file. I did this: 1) Open your original greyscale bumpmap in Photoshop. 2) Double-click the background to make it a layer. (I hate dealign with a background latyer without a good reason -- I like my layers to behave the same.) 3) Duplicate the layer. You should now have Layer 0 and Layer 1 both with a copy of the bumpmap on it. 4) Create a new layer (Layer 2). Fill it with black. 5) Hide Layers 1 & 2 and go down to layer 0. Run a Stylize->Emboss filter on it. Light it from 135 degrees clockwise (from the upper left in other words). 6) Show layer 1. Do the same, but emboss it from the lower right 45 degrees clockwise. 7) Hide layer 1. Select all and copy merged. 8) change to and show Layer 2, the black layer. 9) flip over to the Channels palette and select the green channel. Click the eyeball box for RGB so you can see the entire thing at once (it will show all channels but you will be working only in green. 10) Paste. 11) click RGB to switch back to all-channels mode. 12) Flip back over to layers. Hide Layer 2 and show Layer 1, your second and lower-embossed version. 13) Select all and copy merged again. Unhide Layer 2 (you should be still in Layer 2, if not, switch back to it) 14) Flip back to channels. Select the red channel and show all channels again. 15) Paste again. Look familiar? If you have opened a BUM as a BMP before, it should. Only perhaps a bit brighter. 16) Switch back to all channels mode. 17) Save as BMP and rename to BUM. In Poser, set it as the bumpmap. (Or you can do the JPEG compressed BUM trick in Poser 4 and hack the .??2 file to point at the JPEg for the bumpmap, but remember this doesn't work for PPP or P5 because it will try to reconvert the JPEG BUM to a BUM, double-BUMming it! -- see my other thread). 18) render. The image in this post was made using a manually created BUM and I think it has a lot better tightness than a Poser-made BUM. There's some 'depression' in the areas in between, but since this was a map for something UVmapped differently, those blank areas in between wuoldn't be on the real model because they are outsie of any UV facets. I think those are some impressively tight bricks, myself! BTW, to get the basic greyscale bumpmap, I did the following: I took the original texture in Photoshop and ran Equalise, then Auto-Levels on it. Then I ran an action I have built for colour stripping that does as follows: Hue/Saturation, colourise mode, to pure red (all the way tothe left) with maximum saturation (all the way to the right) and no lightness asjustment. Next, run Hue/Saturation again, this time not in colourise mode, but select the Red colour range from the dropdown and turn the lightness all the way up (all the way to the right) and don't mess with the main or other colours. This will effectively strip all colour from the image and leave very little of it as a grey tone, which is different from merely converting to Greyscale or desaturating. This I then refined and used as the greyscale bumpmap.