Is it possible to create your own bump maps?

I'm sure that, especially the builders like myself, you know about the ability to use "bump maps" on a prim.

Is it possible to create your own? I mean surely there must be a way because the maps are read from somewhere in order to be in the drop down menu?

If you can't do it then i would like to see LL make this an optional function as i believe that it will add more realism to people's builds.

Like if you made a wall vent texture for example, it would be nice to give the illusion of indentation of each 'rib' of the vent by creating your own custom bump map for it.

Unfortunately, no. You are limited to the bump maps that LL has built into the texture editor.

SL has an extremely hobbled implementation of bump maps, and of texturing in general. In part, this is because a more versatile texture functionality would increase the viewer's rendering chores. In part, it's because LL are a bunch of ninnies who don't implement features we want, only features they think the millions of people who haven't signed up yet might want.

I must agree with that - It is stupid that they don't do what we'd like them to do when it comes to building. I've been doing 3D graphics outside of SL for about 9 years and i know that, had i not already been introduced to it a few years back, they had the options more complient to 3D design - I'd use it all the time.

They need to stop doing things for the 'greater good' and concentrate on what their current traffic deems to be advantatious to their Second Life experience.

I'd rather see http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesostructures_GSoC_2008 finished...

Was that ever started? I mean in terms of being implemented in a viewer, not just demos for theory.

Weird... Barnett is my RL surname lol.

They did an announcement of the Google Summer of Code projects back then but as far as I know they never did a follow-up at the end to talk about progress .

It's a good name .

Go Barnetts!

Wow-! I had not seen tht before- another dream...

And yes bump maps one could add wd be awesome- I wonder if there wd be away that if say the folks at Emerald who are ever so muchc better than LL at the viewer thing, were to implement that, wd it be viable for folks on the standard viewer. Like the odd shaped prims are just as 'real' in the std viewer as they are on Emerald.

You and me both. That and meshes, speed tree, the materials project...

LL has too many irons in the fire or they had too many. With M. at the helm all the great projects might have been left to the realm of never was in SL terms. I would love to see the perpixel technology come to SL but being able to upload bump maps would be a nice consolation. It will be up to the 3rd party viewers to do the lab's job again when it comes to the more complex coding.

I've never understood why they won't implement custom bumpmaps. The functionality is clearly there already.

The one thing you can do with some effectiveness is use the brightness/darkness settings. Bright or dark areas (respectively) in your texture map will appear to be raised. So if you don't mind a monochrome look, just make a bumpmap and use it as your texture. It's hardly idea, but can be used to create some nice effects.

To the OP:

As long as I've been here, I've been asking for Custom Bump maps.

Customer surnames go into the surname pool eventually.

This comes up at most every Nyx office hour I've attended. The intent seems to be to eventually replace (or augment?) bump maps with normal maps (or something), and for that to wait until there's a proper Materials model (or something). I gather this all may mean something coherent to somebody with the right background in graphics.

There IS something you can do that works well a lot of the time. There is a "darkness" and a "Lightness" selecton for the bump mapping which uses cues in the texture itself. It works GREAT on some textures like diamond plate and wood patterns (some), stuff like that.

If I remember right it was explained to me that you can actually edit the bumpmaps that download when you download SL. You will see the results but no one else will. Their SL will still be using the standard SL bumpmaps.

So the answer is YES, but NO it wont do any good.

Of course I could have just imagined all this, so in that case, never mind.

This is probably true because you can change the clouds in the same way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf5YkVu1zFo
I only see a use for it if you're taking special snapshots or making vids but its a good thing to know.

If there are any 'older' branches out doing this in SL, they'd be rather useless by now.
Doing displacement mapping in shaders or cpu will use a lot of cycles.

Displacement mapping or tessellation is one of the latest 'additions' of direct x 11 and open gl 3 standards though. (it's been part of ATI hardware for a while now). Look for the unigine heaven demo on youtube for a good example of displacement mapping.

You need hardware support to have tessellation work well. So, implementing it in SL viewer in 2008 would have been too early for 99.9% of the users.
Expect all 2010 (direct x 11 compatible) gfx cards to support displacement mapping and tessellation though.

I'm downloading the benchmark now This looks like where SL should be concentrating their resources. This tech appeals to all users current and future. The realism added to buildings is incredible.

The issue with lots of bump maps would be using up more graphics memory, thus raising the minimum system requirements to use SL. It also would raise bandwidth, thus loading down sim hosts (servers) even more. Having a small set of preset maps (which are likely included in the original SL install), does not have as great an impact, since only a few would be typically used at any one time.

Also, professional game designers optimize their map sizes for performance, the bump map may not need to be as high rez as the diffuse (color texture) map. SL builders are not as good about using textures efficiently.