United3dArtists Archive

Many of you basically know that there is a limit to the amount of real detail that can be in a setup for a render....
One of the best ways to fake real detail with billions of polygons on flat surfaces is to use bump mapping or displacement mapping..
but how do we get real structures into bumpmaps that has always been more or less a problem..
There is a trick though that uses either Vue or Sketchup that can do exactly that....
Other then many other render engines Vue has very cool mixed materials...
you can ad dependencies inside Vue so that material A is distributed towards the top of an object like a mountain
and material B towards the bottom.... you have very precise control over that function of the material editor....
Most of you know that when you make bumpmaps the most protruding parts are white and the ones that are less protruding are darker right down to black.
Now if you make a model of something like a stonewall or a window all you have to do is import the object into Vue and lay it flat or horizontally...
the parts that are coming out more are the ones that are on the top.... the less prtruding parts are the ones lower in the scene..
If you make a mixed material with white on the top blending down to black you bascically got your bumpmap..

You then make a render without a sun but a plain white jpeg as an enviromental map........or in other words white as an ibl....
What you get is a render where the hights are white and the lows are black...
finished is your bumpmap....
Here I have a file of a Window inside Vue 8 INF. and the render you get.....
When you apply that to your buildings you get billions of windows with a very low poly count and small maps...
If you use Sketchup all you have to do is import your object into sketchup and project a gradient from the side onto your object and you got the same thing...
Whit on top down to black on the bottom..
Peter

Here is the Vue file from Vue 8 Inf...
it should work in other versions 8 or higher....
you can see how I did it...
Peter

here is how the material is set up..

You can also use a Z-depth shader or Depth render pass to generate the bump.