Bump maps in color?

Burpee

Can the color jpgs in the texture folder be used as bump maps? I plugged one into the bump area and I can only see a very small amount of bump even when I kick it up very high.

sriesch

You can. However I'm not sure how it interprets the colors, since normally the opposite extremes for height are black and white, I wonder if the effect could be less because of this? You could try playing with a copy of the image in your graphics editor, maybe convert it to black and white, then maybe mess with the contrast and/or brightness.
Remember you can also adjust the Negative Bump and Positive Bump sliders to larger values. I often have to crank them way the heck up in order to see any effect at all. The default values appear to be 0.01, maybe try changing them to 1 or 10 and see what happens, then back down from there until you are satisfied.

Jaderail

Sean is correct. When making these FAKE bump maps from the texture files Convert to a 256 color Grey Scale image, then If your BUMP is still to low try INVERTING that image. That is the best I've managed with a FAKED one. As the BUMP sees MID grey as FLAT adjusting Contrast can work but also might remove detail.

Also the Min and Max are not Set in stone, you can even put neg numbers in the positive side if you want. As long as you get the effect your after try anything...

Richard Haseltine

Making Max negative and Max positive would be the same as inverting the map. Increasing the spread between Min and max would be the same as using Levels or Contrast to increase the dynamic range of the map. The colour values should be changed by DS to grey values. In other words you don't have to change the map at all, though it may be easier to visualise - the main issue is that colour maps rarely make good bump maps, especially if they are already showing the effects of lighting.