cool tools for cool artists 3D scultping for 2D minds...


Spheres

Discovering Bump Mapping
more tutorials

back to:    -  Curvy 3D Overview   All  Tutorials  -             
 

powerful animation software, Anime Studio Pro

Getting started with Digital
Painting on a slim budget:


PD Artist now 19!
Draw, Sketch, Animate & Paint
powered by Project Dogwaffle

Can't afford
PD Artist at $19?


Someone else is willing to pay for your copy of PD Artist, if you buy something from them first - and there are many products and services to choose from!


postwork shop, filter effects, graphics art FX, styles editor

Discovering Bump Mapping

You can left-click the Bump map next and select the same texture, or right click to load it again from file, or even load another.



After loading the image file (or a texture from the presets) into the texture map, that texture map is the active map. The view that shows the map now shows "Bump Map" instead of "Base Colour"



The bump map shows its effect as you adjust the slider next to its thumbnail. With bump mapping, you get to see that these bumps from the cell patterns are more pronounced, less flat.



Here's a timelapse animation showing the changing amount of bump mapping while scrubbing the slider. This is done in real-time!








 
Beyond the Bump map: the Curvy Map

Bump maps can be a very powerful tool to make it look more detailed, give it more depth, even though there is no actual 3D deformation involved. It is all just in the appearance during the lighting phase of rendering. The color or brightness of a pixel is affected by the bump map, but ultimately, not its location on screen. The geometry doesn't change, there aren't any more geometric details on there, even though it may look like there are. You can tell for example that even though you may apply a very rugged texture as a bump map, the profile of the sphere still looks like a perfectly smooth surface of a sphere.

In order to go beyond the bump mapping effect, in order to see the geometry actually change its shape as a result of the texture used to control it, you'll need another map: a displacement map. Curvy 3D supports an implementation of real-time displacement maps, called Curvy maps. We will definitely want to explore this feature, as it is amazingly capable and possible to create insane models within seconds by combining geometric modeling with image based techniques.

Here are just a few teasers:

a single object made of two brush strokes (Lathe object)



The same object with a plaid pattern applied to the base color map



The same plaid pattern used as the displacement map (Curvy map). Note how it actually displaces portions of the geometry, even though we still have the original curves-based model, not converted to mesh yet. Curvy 3D does this in real-time as you adjust the intensity slider.



And with yet another texture applied as Curvy map.




and even more.





Another map applied to another object: here we used the sphere from the tutorial above and applied a bumpy pattern from PD Pro. The displacement generates hills and valleys. The plain black bottom is useful in the base color map.




Here's a look at dynamically adjusting the intensity slider value of the Curvy map.




When the slider is in the middle (resting) position, no displacement occurs. When moving the slider to the right, then the brighter, lighter portions of the texture cause the geometry to be pushed out, while the darker parts get sucked towards the inside. The opposite happens when moving the slider to the left of the middle: the lighter parts move deep into the object while the darker regions come out.

In the above example, the original sphere is still represented by its construction curve (shown in orange), but the same real-time displacement with Curvy maps is also possible with models that have been converted to meshes. Internally, Curvy just manages that for you and keeps a meshed representation for you to see that is updated dynamically if you edit the contruction curve. The Curvy map displacement is applied after taking in consideration the curve's shape, if it changes. In other words: you don't have to think, it just works :-)








Spheres Tutorials
Drawing a Sphere
Base Color Maps
Bump Maps
Displacement Maps


Beginner Tutorials
Photoshop 3D Layers
Bones 101
Teapot
Dogwaffle 101
Teapot Confetti
Renaming & Grouping
Booleans
Web Graphics
Smooth
Monkeyfaces
Straight Lines


 


   
buy digital drawing, sketching, painting and animation software: Project Dogwaffle - beyond digital painting