Use Bump Maps to Create Realistic Materials

Bump Maps create fine level of surface detail on 3D objects. They simulate roughness of material or add small depth detail that is too small for the 3D mesh to display.

Fusion’s bummap tool can be attached to the bumpmap material input of the blinn, phong, ward, or cook-torrance material. While bump maps do not change the geometry, they impact the way the renderer interprets light and specularity on the surfaces. Darker and lighter areas caused by surface roughness or small extrusions are calculated from the bumpmap texture.

In its simplest version, a bump map is a height map. A grayscale image that gives height information for each point on the surface of the 3D geometry.

3D applications like Blender or Maya frequently create normal maps for use as bump maps. These normal maps give additional information about the surface orientation at each point of the surface and they can also be connected to Fusion’s bumpmap tool.

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