Hi there! Time for a stupid question... Im so tired now (6:30 in the morning here in Sweden)and I have been working all night on this problem with using .jpg image for a tree texture. I purchased the excellent Kromekat's Ultimate Woodland Textures Complete and am currently working on a forest image (obviously =) Now, I have created a smooth tree trunk out of a terrain and in the material editor, I created a new material using the "OldPine&TreeMoss" image and applied it to the trunk terrain. I then proceeded to applying a bump layer with the exact same size using the same image file. What I get after I render is a very dark surface, almost fuzzy. I have tried with different gain values, (the pictures are mapped cylindrical for the tree shape), but it never looks good! I applied the same material to one of the Solid Growth trees, and it looked perfect with a working bump surface! Now, my question is: "WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?" This is really driving me nut's! I have been scavenging througt all forums I can find in search for en answer.....Does it have something to do with the terrain size? ...complexity?

You can see what I mean in the picture!

THANK's to anyone who can help me!

-Peter, a.k.a tired n00b!

I don't think you have the bumps turned up far enough. Turn it up more. Look at the solid growth tree bump map and see what it's settings are. Try the same settings and then try turning that up more if it's not working properly. You could also save the solid growth bump and use it on your other bark. I found I had to turn up the bumps lots to get it to look real with mapped pictures. You also need a bit of highlight to get bar to look perfect. I use the same pattern as the bump for that in the highlight section of the material editor. Make sure you also have the scale of the bump proper. It looks like you have it turned up to much. make sure the gain number is the same, that's important. It makes the biggest difference on bumps. Oh one more thing to check if you made the tree trunk double click on it's name and turn off smoothing.

Thank's for the quick reply! When you say "turn up the bumps" ...are you refering to the bump gain? ..I have tryed that but still did not get a satisfactory result. Any specific range you recomend? As for the highlights, do tou use the same .jpg image for the highligt production under the variable highligts tab? The scale of the bump is the same as the mapped picture (x and y axis)...so what do you mean by making sure the gain number is the same? Also, the smoothing option does not work with terrains! Thank's for any further help!

Yes you can use the same image over and over again for the bark, bump and Highlight. make sure that the scale of every image is the same. you may find that Vue changes it on bump and highlight. Here I just loaded up one of my barks. These are the settings: Color mode Mapped picture Picture scale 1 this is a 512 X 512 picture cylindrical mapping. Bumps gain -1 x .2 y .2 z.2 You may want more bump than I got on this one. I don't have highlight turned on on this one. It's a picture of dead wood and it realy looks proper with these settings. What I do when I'm trying to figure out what's doing what is I make up a bunch of objects like a simple cylinder say then render them with all slightly different setting so I know if I'm adjusting things in the right direction or not.

Thank's Pete! It's working better now! I also forgot to tweak the ambient and diffuse lighting from the start. I find however that the bump mapping isn't strong enough...even with a high gain.....so is there any filter function I could use? Sorry for bothering you again! =)

If it's not working you must be real close to the trees in your scene. You could try saving a bump from one of the default trees or you could "fix" the bump image in a program to add more of a bump to it. You want more stronger contrast in a black and white image of your bark. Then just import this special bump image with the original color one.

You could also try to change the x and y setting in the bump section scale to a number larger than the z. That should grow the bumps so they stand out from the tree more.
Try this. Get rid of the bark picture and just set the tree to a white color. From there adjust your bumps till you get the effect you want them import the tree bark picture back in. It's hard to see what's going on trying to look threw the image of the bark. I have a bark here that just has y adjusted to 2 and x and z one. Also you may want to abandon the bump image all together and make your own. You can get big bumps by changing the filter in the bump section to something more coarse. It may be harder to make it look real though. I just made one with the wood filter and heavy terrain funtions and it looks pretty bumpy.

One more thing if you look at the image of the bark it's not very contrasty so there for you're getting very little bumps out of it. You have to make the image more white and black to generate bumps. There is too much gray in it. Make a new gray scale image with the color image and then turn the contrast up on the gray scale image to +90. I just tried it with the images you got posted here and it works just fine.

I turned the gray scale contrast up for the bumpmap and I am getting better results! Thanks again Pete....your a life saver! =)

Hello there! I would say that the advice given for turning up the contrast of a separate bump map was good. I have no experience of Vue, but fundamentally it will work the same as Bryce I presume. Increasing specularity/highlight on the bump channel would help too. I must add that the original image provided in the pack is not as dull as the rendered examples here, and has an accurate contrast level! :) (as the attached section of the original shows!) Hope you get it sorted to your satisfaction! :)

Let us know how it works out for you. :)

Just a question: are you using for the bump the same image with the same image mode (I means with full colors)? If yes, try using a copy of it, converted in grayscale on Photoshop and working there with contrast and brightness settings. Usually, fining tuning setting with the tolls that a paint program offer to you, you can reach the result you want. ***Luca "cinacchi"