Examples of good image maps?

fakedoctor

It seems like every character has a wildly different set of specular and bump maps than the rest. Some of them are really dark or light, some have very low constrast, some are negatives of the diffuse greyscale, etc. Some characters don't come with these maps at all. It's not just the problem where Poser has some wonky defaults for using bump maps either - even among Poser products there seems to be no consistency between vendors (or even between a vendor's products) at all.

This makes it really difficult to make skin look right in Daz (3Delight). At this point I feel like it'd be less work to edit or create entirely new maps in PhotoShop than to endlessly tweak surface settings to make these maps functional. As I think about doing this, however, I realize that I've seen so many bad maps that I don't know what a good one should look like!

It looks like the basic Genesis 2 defaults (and probably most of the major character releases like Victoria, Michael, Olympia, etc) are actually really good in this respect. The bump maps are a medium grey with darker and lighter spots but nothing crazy, and the spec maps are mostly dark with a few exceptions, and the light areas (lips, etc.) still have some good details. Would these be a good reference for trying to edit some decent textures for other characters?

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure that you want control maps - especially bump - to have a low dynamic range (not hitting black or white) as that is wasting colour values. Where possible the map should cover the full dynamic range, to allow as many gradation between as possible, and the values should be adjusted to make the map behave as intended. Specular strength and others are slightly complicated as the minimum is set to zero, so if the minimum desired value is greater than zero the darkest colours will not be used, but adjusting the numbers should stil allow the maps to use all values between the desired minimum and white.