Digital Art Zone

Len had wondered in one of his posts about Bryce 7.1’s Enhanced Bump. So I thought I’d post some images that show the differences. My comments are based on the visual not the technical. I’ll leave that to others, if they are so inclined.

The biggest problem with Bump mapping since B1 was that it changed, often radically, depending on orientation. This image shows the “Pitted Concrete” preset. The pits are supposed to be negative but as shown in the left vertical 2d rectangle, it flips to positive and it “shadows” as if the light is from the left when the light is from the right. The horizontal is correct. The right image vertical rectangle the Enhanced Bump correctly.

This image show the correction of reflection and specularity with e-bumps.
The old bump didn’t react like it it was curved, so it didn’t reflect that way or have specular highlights when vertical. The e-bump now reflects the horizontal rectangle and has some specular highlights.

This last one shows how the old bump mapping has some really dark and ugly bump “shadowing”. The e-bump looks so much better.

So while sometimes e-bumps don’t make a difference it’s usually better to switch it over. As far as I can tell all the presets that come with Bryce 7.1 use the Legacy bump mapping.

Oh - the Enhanced Bump is found in the Material Editor’s Options popup (where the shadowing options are).

Also, to really see this stuff, check out the full size image.

Hey Dan, yup, great examples of what changed with the bump-mapping :-)

Can’t remember exactly when he spotted it, but it was clever-dick Brinnen as usual, and I remember ranting-on about needing an Anisotropic shader and David asking me for a demonstration of it.  I pointed out a Hi-Fi volume knob to him, and just as I thought, he tried doing it without a real shader.  What became obvious is that using the old bump was faulty because the grooves he’d created to mimic the diamond cutting were getting ignored, and even if it had worked, there would be horrible moire anyway.

On that knife render of his, the one with the grooves in the floor, that would never have been possible without the bump fix because Bryce’s bump-mapping vectors were pretty screwed-up.  The shadow would have been solid across the grooves.  David got pretty obsessed with this bug and eventually it got fixed.

It’s just one of the niceties Vasily was able to work out and fix, not a new feature, but really important.
Thanks to them both, I can render some vinyl :mrgreen:

This are great demos, Dan. Thanks for going to all the trouble to post it here. Bump was wrong in 6 and 5 but since bump is sort of cheating, I couldn’t put my finger on to what’s wrong. As pumeco said, it was finally David who pushed this matter so it got resolved.

Horo, what was it caused him to spot the bump thing?
I’m sure he knew about it before the Anisotropic thing, was it you?

pumeco - 09 December 2012 01:37 PM

Horo, what was it caused him to spot the bump thing?
I’m sure he knew about it before the Anisotropic thing, was it you?

I’m usually not particularly shy to claim being the one with the smart idea. In this case - as I remember - it was David when he went after that anisotropic thingy. I was so wrapped up with the sky lab and IBL at the time that I wasn’t able to fully grasp what he went on about. If it were important, we could unearth it in the Basecamp SC, which is archived, but still open for us for reading.

Oh I remember that, IBL zone was definitely Horo zone ;-)

Well I for one am happy That David did go after it, because he solved a problem for me, that I can try out now I have Bryce 7 installed, with Bump mapping beads on fabric..  Providing of course that I fire up my old PC and find the video he sent me..

We are all happy, Pam. We had never got so many new options and so many odd things rectified as with the last dev cycle.

@pumeco - about that Chrome stalling you mentioned in another tread. I have that regularly. Just move the mouse into the address field and hit return to reload the page. That resolves it. (Sorry OT).

Cheers Horo, although I’d figured that one out :-P
Luckily I only get the problem on this site, I use Firefox just about everywhere else.