Bump Maps!

I have a stone tile texture that I want to make appear to be 3D.

We need a bump map for it. A bump map is basically coloring you can add to an image to make it pop. You can make these easy in Photoshop.

Whoa. No way. I can’t afford that! I’m one guy paying his bills and feeding his family. Let’s use GIMP.

There’s a “lazy” installer you can get from ninite.com as well. That’s what I used.

GIMP is much cheaper than photoshop, but the functionality is much harder to do. I do find it to be less intuitive, and somethings that are automagical in Photoshop are not in GIMP. Bump maps are one of those.

Once you have GIMP installed, go ahead and open the folder that has our texture in it.

Drag and drop our texture into GIMP. It does make the window a bit big, so take a moment to resize it.

Click the new layer button. The layer section is at the bottom right, and the new layer button is at the bottom left of that section.

Give it a good descriptive name, and click ok.

It doesn’t need to be exact. I recommend doing what I did here. Start with a dark shade and lighten till you like it.

Click our foreground color, and pick a nice grey. We can always come back and adjust it if its too dark or bright if we need with good old Ctrl + Z.

Before you start the next step, make sure you have our new layer selected in the bottom right.

Click on edit, then “Fill with FG Color”. It will turn everything to that plain grey. This is fine.

The bumpmap layer needs to be selected here too.

Next, go to Filters, then Map, then Bump Map… .

We get this new menu. Start by selecting the big ? button, then select our original layer. Finally! We made it to the bump map.

We can now adjust the settings as we need. Once you are satisfied with the results, click ok.

See that option that says “Overwrite” with the original file name? Do not click it. You will regret immediately if you do.

Finally, go to File, Export As.

Give it a good descriptive name in the menu that appears.

In the next menu, the defaults are good for us, so go ahead and click export.

Huzzah! We have our bump map. Now let’s use it!

As long as we kept it in that folder, we shouldn’t need to re-import it.

On our Stone texture, we are setting the displacement mode to Pixel.

Next, add the bump map we made to the height map.

Now we can use the amplitude setting next to the high map to adjust and make it look 3D, despite it being just a flat texture!