Create Quick Bump / Displacement Maps:

A lot of texture creators out there offer "bump maps" with their texture images. It's very important to take a closer look at these images to see if they are truly accurate bump maps, and not simply grey-scaled versions of the image.

It's important that if you are using these maps in your 3D Software, these "bump maps" are using additional resources - when you may as well just use the image itself as a bump map. One of the reasons we can offer our collection at such a low price, is that we feel it is a great foundation on which to build your own bump maps, should you need them.

I've found for most 3D art, bump maps aren't really all that necessary, but more of an extra punch if you need them. Often I simply use the bitmap itself, and if it doesn't jive with how the "peaks and valleys" really *are*, then I Invert it within the 3D material editor.

For example, Brick Mortar is white and bricks are usually dark. Since the whites in a bump map "rise", and darks "recess", this is actually opposite of the bump map effect we *want*, so we will "Invert" the map within the Bump Map state.

How Bump Maps Work:

In this last "inverted" state (which can be achieved with a simple toggle button in your 3D material editor), we see the true nature of a good bump map: the whites make the surface rise, and the darks make the surface recede.

This last rendering uses the bump map on NURBS geometry. It uses the simple inverted bump map within the displacement map channel slot within the 3D material editor. Notice how the brick's actually come out of the surface.

When Simple Greyscale-Conversion Bump Maps *Don't* Work:

As mentioned earlier, sometimes using the image itself (or an inverted image of itself) will not create realistic results in 3D. So be careful when buying textures that come with these "bump maps". It helps to see the image and bump map side by side to see if the high-points really are brighter in value than the recessed areas.

Here's a case where it doesn't work either way (regular or inverted):
These concrete blocks have triangular indentations with 45 degree bevels.

If you were to use this image as a bump map (and exaggerate a bit),
it would look like this: in a bump map setting, it would make the dark
areas recede like grooves, which is incorrect...

...when in reality, the triangles themselves should recede like this.
(By using darker values for deeper surfaces).
We'll take this a step further in the following step.

Making the Bump Map in Photoshop:

Open your tileable texture. This particular one is called BLOK007.jpg. Go ahead and use the color low-rez version from the panel above, but please don't use commercially or distribute.

First you want to make sure all recessed areas fit on one screen. Since there are triangles here (see above image), we want to offset, so that we have seamless edges. Click Filter>Offset, then enter a value of +68 seems to center all the triangles nicely.

Then click the new layer button to create a new empty layer. Now that you're on the new layer, select the Polygon Lasso tool and draw a triangle on the perimeter of the triangular space. At any time after the second lasso-click, you can hit the "Backspace" button to go back in your lasso history. Finish the triangle by closing it off.

Keep going and adding new triangles by holding down SHIFT for the first point on each triangle.

Then click Select>Feather, then choose an appropriate value for the thickness of the bevel on your material (in our sample its about 3-5 pixels).

Then Fill the newly feathered selection with black. Now create a new layer, and your layers tool should look like the image on the right.

Now SELECT NONE, so we can draw on the new layer without any selection limits.

Now we select the background layer, then brighten it by using Image>Adjustment>Levels.
Within levels, bring the left ticker slightly to the right, and the right ticker slighly to the left until you get some nice contrast.

Then hit CTRL-U (Or Image>Adjustment>Hue) to grab the Saturation ticker and slide it all the way to the left.

Now our image should look like this:

You can take it a step further by lowering the opacity of your layers, and adding more lines for the seams. The final touch is to clone-tool over the sharp lines on the background layer.

And in our 3D software using Bump Mapping it should look like this:

Or with Displacement Mapping and Bump Map mix:

Feel free to use smaller displacement settings for more subtlety. This example is slightly exaggerated to show you the process.