As some of you know, I've been creating a character and doing my own textures and bump etc. One of the things I've noticed is that while I can achieve what looks to be an optimum bump level, I can switch light sets and suddenly the roughness of the skin looks three times what it was.

What light settings would possibly be effecting this, and/or does this have something to do with my specularity map having too much contrast? Obviously, I would like the difference in apparent skin roughness/bump to be as close as possible from one light set to another. Don't want the user to have to reset bump levels constantly every time different lights are used.

The other odd thing here is that this apparent accentuation of the bump only affects some aspects of things. I.e. it makes the skin look rougher, but where I've built in wrinkles, those aren't accentuated to the same degree... to the point that under some lighting conditions, the roughness of the skin is such that it's hard to see the wrinkles at all.

Insights?

light has nothing to do with bump IMO.

if you have a light coming from the side of the object then the bump will be very visible. this is normal.

No, that doesn't explain what I've been seeing. Moving the light around doesn't help the situation.

Very odd....

Bump does affect the angle of surface normals, which in turn affects specular reflections from directional lights (I've tested for this). So maybe what you are seeing is overblown specular reflection with certain light directions....? Does increasing the specular highlight size (to make the highlights less sharp) reduce the problem?

you know you could post a ......................pic? :) 

Not much to post. Just rougher skin vs smoother. I'm playing with my theory that it had something to do with saving material collections with the same name over one another. We'll see....