What I wanted was a texture map to load onto a sphere to make a bunch craters.  So how to make a bump map to do that?

THE REPLICATOR OF GREATNESS!!!!!!  Yes space folks, I have just discovered the replicator and I'm going a little nuts with it but hey, here we go.  So here's the result of dialing the process a little but I LOVE how it came out.

So I thought to myself, self, you want to place a whole bunch of rings onto a sphere.  Use the replicator!  So I created a single "crater" map by having the border be gray, the ridge be black and the center of the crater be white.  That's the first square in the image (top left).

Then I put that image into the glow channel on a splat and then I replicated that onto a sphere (see the second square (top right).

Then I put a spherical camera in the middle of the sphere, put a gray backdrop into the scene to match the border of my "crater" image and rendered.  The result is the third square (bottom left).

Then I used that in the bump channel on a sphere and rendered a slice of it (using the technique posted in my most recent tutorial).

Came out just like I wanted.

I thought it would be a cool thing to post.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the scene I setup to render the crater map is a little bit of a trick.  No lights, and the splats are fully transparent with no color.  Just a few details that do make a difference.

well done kixum, hold on and never give up

Sorry, the splats aren't transparent.

Typo.