I'm having a problem getting my bump maps to work right in Poser 5. I'm working on a skin texture and created a bump map for it (a grayscale inverse of the texture map). If I use that bump map in the bump shader, it seems way too aggressive. When I use it in the displacement, it completely breaks the model's mesh in multiple places. When I use it in gradient bump, I don't really see a difference. Which of these three shaders do I need to use and with what settings? I read the part in the manual reguarding the shaders, but it didn't give me enough information to answer my question. Any ideas?

Personally, I prefer displacement maps to bump and if you look at the both the bump and displacement sockets, there is a settable amount for them. For example, using Brycetech's bump/trans maps (from the Bryce skin tutorial) on the displacement channel requires a setting of about .03 or the skin goes all craggy. So the moral is, turn it down until it works right. Keep in mind that displacement maps displace the actual geometry and will look a little more photorealistic in raytrace renders, at the expense of some more render time.

Try turning the displacement map back to about 0.2. I found that worked for mine.

If you are using displacement maps, you need to turn the displacement threshold up in the render settings. The suggested value is a little above your highest displacement setting.

Try plugging your bump map into the "Gradient Bump" section.

Thanks guys. The best result I got was with the bump shader set at .02. I'm not even close to happy with it, though. Maybe I need to do my bump map by hand instead of inverting and grayscaling my texture map? Does anyone know of any bump map tutorials out there for creating realistic skin bumps?

Your best bet for skin bumps is to get s picture or scan of some skin, and make that into a seamless tile, then use that as a bump map, and play with the U & V Scales in the image map node. I have been using that and it works great