Mastering Bump Maps for Curious Labs Poser® and Corel Bryce® Part 2 [Return to Part 1] Now it is time to fire up your paint program. I mainly use Corel Photopaint 8 & 9, but I am sure that Adobe Photoshop will work just as well with this method, but may need some adaption. 1. Load the exported UV Map...                     2. ...and convert it from a 16-colour bitmap to a 24-bit bitmap. (Mode...RGB (24-bit) bitmap) (UV Mapper saves its files as 16-colour picture)                         Before we go any further you will have to draw in some important reference points. Because the UV map consists of 2 halves, a front and a back, the bump map texture must be created so that the seams will meet up. (I found these templates by "SnowSultan" to be very useful.) Male Seam Template Female Seam Template 3. Mark important points like the edge of where you want a collar to be or where the hip joints are. A 2-pixel brush with a bright colour such as red can be used to create the lines. (Draw outside the template extents and one or two pixels into the map area to create a visible line on the rendering.) 4. This is very much a touch-and-go process. Often to test whether or not the textures line up, I keep Poser running in the background. (You will need a fairly fast PC with enough RAM to do this successfully - I currently have 256Mb but this process works with 64Mb) 5. In Poser, Load the figure, go to Materials...                     6. ...and load the UV Map that you have just been working with. (Here's a important tip: Load it as a texture and NOT as a Bump Map for now as you just want to see if the halves line up correctly. If you load it as a bump map, Poser will create a .BUM file and that file will be used. If you then change the original bump map file in Corel PhotoPaint it will not be updated in Poser, and furthermore if you delete the BUM file Poser will not be able to load the original Poser file, and in some cases will crash the program!)                     Now Render the file and with a bit of tweaking here and there, and a whole lot of luck, you should be able to see the seams line up when rendering in Poser.                           Now with the important points lined up and "mapped" correctly it is time to draw in the basic lines that you want to have on the bump map such as collars, beading, panels, pockets, seams etc. (the wrinkles will come later.) If you load the bump map as a texture and not a bump map in Poser, updating will work better when you re-render the picture. Poser will take the updated Bitmap and render the figure with the changes.                     I find using a single pixel line tool with a bright colour is the best way to map out the main lines I need. Once the main lines are sketched in, the work on the bump map can start in ernest, but there are a few tricks that I have learnt that will make you work much easier.
	This concludes the 2nd part of this tutorial. Are you ready for the next part? [Return to the beginning] [Next part]