DeleD Community Edition

[G-Man]

Painting a bump map is a simple proposition to understand... First off a bump map is normally a greyscale image. Each shade of grey indicates the displacement of the surface toward or away from the viewer (in or out along the normal to be precise). The closer the displacement grows to the viewer, the whiter it becomes. The inverse is of course true, darker means further away.

For me, I start out by creating a new layer over top of my texture in PaintShop Pro to paint my bump map onto. That way I can make it semi-transparent so I can follow the underlying geometry of the texture. Then I block out and copy those texture pieces that can be converted to a bump map just by changing them to a grey-scale and stretching the contrast to my new layer. (The bricks in this scene are a good example. I took the underlying brick texture. Converted it to greyscale and then processed it to enhance the difference between light and dark.) Next I hand paint those parts which can't be done using the simple method. If you look at the window frame you'll see an example of that. There I selected a shade of grey that was well brighter than the brightest grey of the surrounding brick texture. I blocked out and painted the window frame in this shade. Then I blended in a bit of the grayscaled wood texture to make the surface not be completely smooth.

On the window itself (the white part) I colored in the various levels of the window. The hinges and "L" shaped brackets are the brightest and the window panes are the darkest. I then blended in a little bit of the greyscaled window texture, again in an effort to introduce a little more variation in the surface. As you can see in the left hand picture though, the window texture has a shadow in the upper right corner that I had limited success at removing. You can see its effect when you look at the odd ridge that seems to appear along the edge of the shadowed area in the bumpmapped version.

[Stefan]

wow nice work g-man looks realy great !

[Br@iner]

I've just one to say:

MARVELLOUS