The bumps I've attempted have really been not so stellar. I'm looking for those smooth little dimples that I see on occasion. I use psp and turned each skin greyscale then negative. Attached them like this...

Also confusing me are these settings in the dialog box. Are these strickly for displ.mapping in Firefly?

If the "dimples" you want are not in the texture, I don't know if you can create them without hand editing your bump file and painting them in or overlaying a desaturated photo of the dimples you want. That's one trick I use to add realism if the model's skin is to smooth in the photos I use. I copy the dimples from a photo I like to a new layer, then desaturate the colors, and then change the layer properties from normal to either soft light or screen and then adjust opacity down to 30-50%. Save the new texture and create the new bump file by opening the jpg, desaturate, change to greyscale, invert, and tweak the contrast and brightness for the new bump file and save it.

Here's a p4 draft result. Has almost nothing to do with the texture. I guess Displ. bounds in Firefly are my real target here. Just was hoping to get lucky the 1st time around (for the 1st time).

d-larsen, Just missed you. Are those connections right? The rest is gonna take a while for me to absorb...

I don't know for sure, I haven't started using displacement nodes yet. What confuses me most from what I see in your settings is using a specular node under the alternate_diffuse node? I don't want to send you off track so I had best defer to more seasoned experts with nodes. Sorry!

You don't have to use both the bump and displacement channel, one of them is enough. They use different technoligies to achieve more or less the same thing. In this case, I would use the bump channel only and set the strength to about 0.01 as a start and then experiment from there. When I use displacement, it's for less subtle effects such as roughening up a concrete wall...

If your bump- or displacement map is just a negative greyscale version of the texture map, you dont need an additional map. Just plug the normal texture in a math node, and subtract it from 1. Plug that into the bump or displacement channel. That will save memory and thus speed up the render. I agree with Kelederk, you probably only need a bump or a displacement effect.

Thanks for that...Same for p4 and firefly? This is where I really get lost!

Well..time for me to go horizontal! Been up a looong time. Any leads will be used. I'd like to eventually do some killer closeups with certain skins. I'll ckeck back in 4. Thanks