Lovely Lady Bump Maps

My eyes were immediately drawn to the cover of the GameInformer magazine peeking from under a stack of mail on my kitchen table when I came home this afternoon. Before I knew what the game on the front cover was I knew I loved the design, and had tried my hand at it frequently in my drawings in the past. Black and White. Strong Highlights. Dark Shadows. Due to the topics' iconic ears I quickly recognized the game to be the sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum. However even while my subconscious was making these connections in the back of my mind, my first real thought when looking at this picture was "Wow! Look at Catwoman's bump map!"

Bump maps have been being used for at least a few years now to make models look more detailed without having to model all of those details. For example, the mesh patterned shadows on Catwoman's outfit, or the criss-cross lines, seams bolts and possibly even the beveled logo on his chest are all made to look like they were modeled in 3D using bump maps.

I have read a lot about bump maps, had a fair idea of how to implement them in Blender, but had never actually done it before. While I hear it's bad form to post test renders rather than actual pieces of art, I still thought I would post these anyway, just for fun. I mean... I haven't posted anything else in a while anyway...

If you came across this trying to learn how to implement bump maps yourself, here is a quick how-to for Blender 2.49:

1. Create an object.

2. Add a new material under the material panel.

3. Create a custom texture for that material under the texture panel. This texture is Veroni: W1=0.884, W2=-0.810, all others are default.

4. Go back to the material panel. Under the Map Input tab press the "Nor" button.

5. Under the Map To tab, deselect the "Col" button, and press the "Nor" button. Click it once for regular mapping (text is white) or twice for negative mapping (text is yellow).

6. Adjust the "Nor" slider to your satisfaction. The bump mapping isn't very impressive at 0.00. (In this example the value is equal to 11.31).

Other settings of note. There are two default lamps, and one spotlight in the scene. Material color is a very light gray. Diffuse shader is Lambert: Ref=0.496, Specular Shader is Toon: Spec = 0.153, Size=0.323, Smooth=0.10. There is also a Spec Ramp, first color is clear (alpha = 1) and second color is white positioned at 0.690 on the colorband.

Finally, here is Suzie doing a very bad Catwoman impersonation, but doing a good job of demonstrating a combination of smooth and bumped materials on the same mesh. Joey and Kimmie thought I was trying to make Bugmonkey:

That's all for now. I have some other 3D projects I'm working that I hope to be able to post soon that should be WAY more exciting, so be sure to keep an eye open!