You know how ya can Create Geometry from bump maps to create landscapes.

you know how zBrush can create geometry using alpha maps.

Was wondering if we had a character mapped and had a dragon scale bump map covering all of the mesh.
If there was some way to convert the bump map in to geometry on the mesh ?

I want to create geometry on to all of "360 degrees" the mesh all at the same time from a 2D map.

So how do we do this in what CGI App's ?

Thanks.

Well the answer is "yes, but..."

First what you want is displacement not bump. Depending on how your bump map is made it might or might not give you good results for displacement. This also depends on the application. 

If you have a suitable bump map you can use many of the higher end 3D apps to"bake" the displacement  into geometery. I use Vue Infinite for this purpose. Some things to keep in mind: 

• You will typlically end up with very high polygon counts depending on the amount of detail.  In Vue one can control this to some degree.

• The polygon flow/topology will be usually quite bad. This can make UV mapping difficult and if you want to rig the figure you will need to redo the mesh most likely.

Ciao

TD

A 4096x4096 displacement map will give you more then 16 Milj micro polygons to work with, depending on the uv mapping of the object.

So the result depends on the object file, the uvmapping, and the displacement map.
Also in Poser BLACK = NO displacement
WHITE is max displacement.

Remark; a displacement map has to be set at GC 1.000 (Just like a bump or transmap, or any other Black and White map.)

Thanks for the info