Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Creating normal maps... and where to place them.

jartz opened this issue on Mar 10, 2019 ยท 88 posts


SamTherapy posted Fri, 15 March 2019 at 5:59 PM

Crikey, that is one hell of a question. Short answer is, to get a good, realistic bump map is a colossal pain in the hind end and every bit as time consuming as creating a diffuse texture from scratch. But more so. Effectively you'd have to draw every wrinkle, crease, pore and whatnot, since there's no efficient way of extracting them wholesale from a diffuse map. That said, you may be able to get away with using premade photos of pores, wrinkles and creases, desaturated, then placed into appropriate areas on a blank map. Way, way back, Anton suggested using a desaturated scan of orange peel for pores. Never tried that one myself but it sounds like it could work. You could hand paint creases, blurring brush edges and blending, and maybe using a fine grain "granite" overlay in places. Any or all of these methods, plus many more I don't know about. Just bear in mind that your overall map shouldn't shade or lighten overall. It will definitely look very different from any of the bump maps you're used to seeing but since it's only interested in generating bumps, not shade, it should work properly.

I may be wrong here but ISTR BB used to create them through his old shader tricks, but I don't think the whole shader works properly with current versions of Poser. Repeat, I could be wrong.

All that said, SnarlyGribbly's EZSkin can generate procedural bump maps for you, and that's the method I use nowadays, on the rare occasion I render humans.

Coppula eam se non posit acceptera jocularum.

My Store

My Gallery