Practice Chanter Needs a Bump(map)

[fae_alba]

Folks, I'm working on a side project using this practice chanter. I wanted to dress it up and add a bump map to the chrome collar. But the tga image doesn't seem to create the definition I wanted. The decal was applied with as a cylindrical decal, type bump. Any ideas on how to best set up a bump map to get this decal to show as etched in the chrome?

[fae_alba]

Here's a close up of the etching...

[fae_alba]

Here's the bump map graphic

[modernhorse]

Hi Paul -

This is off topic but, how'd the whole financing thing you were working on go?

 

Doug

[fae_alba]

Still in process...met with a corporate finance laywer last weekend. He specializes in getting companies ready for financing, his sons are NYC finance lawyers specializing in first and second tier venture funding. So we're hopefull this will produce what we need. Believe me you all on the forum will be the first to know!

[gra4mac]

Hi Paul. The area you are applying the bump map to is pretty small to show much detail, but try "bumping" up the % value to get more bump. If your starting at 100%, try 200 and keep going until it's too much. Good luck.

[zandoriastudios]

Did you set key color to "not set"? If it is excluding the black (default) then that might explain it....

[fae_alba]

Thanks guys for the input..I made sure the key color was not set and even bumped the percent up tae 600% and it didn't make much of a difference. I suspect the image being used as the bump, and since it wasn't overly important to make it an etched look, just something I wanted to play with, I decided to change the the decal type to color and this is the result.

 

Now to the next step..I'll be putting this chanter to use as a beginners bagpipe tutorial, and "lip-synching" the fingering positions to the respective notes, then allowing the student to enter notes, songs etc and have the program move thru the finger positions. I'll write it in visual basic, the only question is how to animate the hand movements. I'm thinking rendering out stills of each note, then using these as slides in the application. Any one have thoughts on this?

[ypoissant]

For a bump map to work, the edges need to be blurred because the surface normal is modified according to the tone gradient in the bitmap. Sharp transitions from white to black won't work. You will need at least an intermediary gray between any black and white pixels. The best way to get that is by blurring the bitmap. Your current antialiasing grays are not enough. I applied a 1-pixel blur to your map (attached).

[gschumsky]

For a bump map to work, the edges need to be blurred because the surface normal is modified according to the tone gradient in the bitmap. Sharp transitions from white to black won't work. You will need at least an intermediary gray between any black and white pixels. The best way to get that is by blurring the bitmap. Your current antialiasing grays are not enough. I applied a 1-pixel blur to your map (attached).

Good call Yves. I was just going down the thread and thinking the same thing. This was a problem I had a long time back as well and Steve S. gave me this tip. Suprised Sutton didn't catch that too!

[fae_alba]

Thanks on the tip with the blur..I'll play with that and see if I get the effect I want.

[gra4mac]

I just tried Pauls jpg image for the bump and it worked fine.

[fae_alba]

Aye lads that's the stuff. I also found that the chrome material obscured the bump more than I wanted, so after the new blurred image, removing the chrome material we have this.

[aaver]

If you blur a bump map, as Yves suggested, you will get a nicer result, but you should see bumps even if you don't.

 

I think you still have a problem with the key color.

 

If you apply a decal image that you haven't imported to the project, my experience is that the key color change doesn't have any effect on the decal . The solution is to close the project and reopen it.

 

A better method that works for me is to import the image first, set the key color and then apply the image as a decal.

 

The first image is an example of with your unmodified bump map and the second one is when the bump map is blured:

 

[fae_alba]

Here's a quick test. Close project...bring in bump map, set key color to not set, import chanter, apply image, increase percentage to 300%.

[mtpeak2]

If you want it indented, set the percentage to -300%.