Matching Bumpiness with Textures

I'd like to create some textures that match the bumpy surfaces in the texture dialogue - a brickwork texture would look much better if it were overlaid with the 'bumpy' bricks, for instance. The trouble is that the idea won't work unless the two match up exactly and texture creation would seem to involve an endless series of hit-or-miss uploads in order to achieve this.

Does anyone know if templates of the bumpy textures are available for download?

I would just put the bump on a face of a big cube and take a snapshot of it.

Thanks for the suggestion, Sylvia, but I already tried a similar trick and it didn't work out. I even used the Print Screen button and pasted into a fairly large Photoshop file for extra detail. The result just wasn't accurate enough. The slightest clash between bumpiness and the image file causes ugly artifacts close up and some degree of blurring at a distance.

Vector templates of the bumpy textures would be a tremendous help for developers wishing to add the effect of three dimensions. As it stands, the bumpy textures only work with flat colour or blurry, indistinct image files.

I don't understand why they aren't available for download.

Ephraim, the files you're looking for are in your Second Life\skins\textures folder. All the bump maps (and lots of other things) are in there as J2C files.

To edit and/or use the J2C images in Photoshop, you'll need to first install the JPEG2000 plugin on the Goodies CD that came with Photoshop. If you're using something other than Photoshop, then you'll have to see what options it's got for JPEG2000 support.

But before you can use them, you'll obviously need to be able to find them. With over 800 images in the folder, most named only by their SL UUID numbers, a thumbnail viewer is a must. Windows Explorer by default will not display thumbnails for J2C's, which means the File -> Open dialog in most programs won't either, and that includes Photoshop. However, if you've got any version of PS that came out in the last few years, you should also have Adobe Bridge, and Bridge will show thumbnails for almost anything. As much as I dislike Bridge, it does have its uses. If you've got it, use it for this.

If you're not using Adobe products, try Googling for "JPEG2000 thumbnail viewer". You'll find several freebies. I haven't tried any of them, so I can't tell you whether or how well any one might work. You'll have to experiment.

I believe the brick texture you're looking for is b8eed5f0-64b7-6e12-b67f-43fa8e773440.j2c

Thanks for your lengthy and informative reply, Chosen - you have filled a real big hole in my understanding of SL. I'll go get them bumps straight away.

But, as far has I can understand, to use the 'bump maps' and other texture at the same time, for instances a bump map for bricks over a brick texture, we must use an external program, like GIMP and overlap the 2 pictures with one of them transparent (the bump map). Am I right or wrong?

It depends on your definition of "at the same time". You certainly don't need to do anything special to apply one of the bump maps to a prim at the same time as another texture. All the controls for that are right on the Texture tab in the in-world object editor. But you probably know that already.

If you're talking about using the bump maps as templates to create textures that will align with them precisely, which is what Ephraim is looking to do, then yes, what you're describing is what we've been talking about. You'd open the bump map image in a raster editor like GIMP or Photoshop, and then use them as templates for your own textures. It's basically the same process as working with the clothing templates. The existing image shows you where everything needs to be on the canvas, and then whatever you want to paint onto it from there is up to you.

There are many ways of setting it up, though. It doesn't have to be a translucent overlay, as you suggested, although it certainly could be. You could have the bump map as your background layer and paint on top of it, for example. Or you could put the bump map onto an alpha channel, and use that channel to control 2D lighting effects directly in Photoshop. Or you could trace it with vector paths, and use those paths as the basis to form selections for all kinds of painting and filtering purposes. You could even bring one into a 3D application like Maya or Blender, and put it in bumpiness channel of an applied material you've created there, to bake a texture. Etc., etc., etc. The possibilities are endless.

...

That I know
But as always, everything you say is like a tutorial. Ty Chosen.