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This shows how an image can be used to define the color andor bump map of a material.

You can assign two or more textures to a material - for instance - 1 texture to display and another texture to create bumps.

The main effect of the bumps is an increase in shadows on the texture as the angle to the light gets sharper - (further from the light.).

New Range Min Max The new range the values will be mapped to.

Bump Normal mapping is a texture-based technique used to give the impression of sub-polygon lighting detail, without having to model it.

The resolution of the these textures are important you ideally want a one pixel per texel maximum resolution to get the best visual results.

Magnifying the texture will blur the results and minifying will lessen the effect with distance.

To chain bump maps and normal maps together we supply a Bump Blender shader node which has been optimized to efficiently blend resultant bump-map displacement vectors together.

Since only normals are perturbed, not geometry, it does not affect shadows.

Normal Mapping Normal maps are controlled by a normal texture which is used to perturb the surface normal.

When using normal maps it is imperative that the gamma setting for your normal maps is set to linear raw.

When this is disabled, the normal that is generated is just the surface normal.

Input Map Type Height-Field: This sets the Bump Map node up to use greyscale height based texture maps for bump mapping.

Object-Space Normal: This sets the Bump Map node up to use object-space normal maps for normal mapping.

Tangent-Space Normal: This sets the Bump Map node up to use tangent-space normal maps for normal mapping.

Object-Space vs Tangent-Space Normals Object-Space Normal maps contain normal information specific to the object it should be applied to.

In Object-Space the up axis is directly tied to the up axis of the object itself and therefore using an Object-Space Normal map on any object other than the one it is intended for will not look right.

Tangent-Space Normal maps contain normal information that can be applied to any object and behave properly.

In Tangent-Space the up axis is relative to an objects surface normal and therefore using a Tangent-Space Normal map on any object will behave correctly.

Below is a comparison of an object-space normal map and a tangent-space normal map.

First the object-space and tangent-space maps are demonstrated on their intended source geometry, both look perfect.

In the second example the same shader is applied to a flat plane which is where you can see how the object-space normal map perturbs the planes normals in such a way that it does not look good.

Comparatively the tangent-space normal map looks much better since it is relative to the surface normals of the plane.

Height Scale This scales the height value that is read from the texture.

A value of 0.0 effectively disables the technique, yielding just the surface normal.

The default is 0.010.

Because this is a visual trick, very large values will not yield good results, so in those cases you should use displacement mapping instead.

Bump Maps