Bump maps are a powerful tool for creating realistically detailed surfaces; unfortunately, there are limited tools for creating them. You must typically use 2D image editing software, which doesn't provide all the tools necessary for creating 3D detail.
BumpCapture comes to the rescue by letting you use the skills of a modeler to create a bump map. First, the artist models the surface as an actual geometric object, and then uses BumpCapture to transform the geometry into a bump map. Once in this form, the bump map can be manipulated in more traditional ways: distorting the bump map, scaling and mixing several bump maps, creating a tiled bump map, etc.
The image on the right shows the effectiveness of a good bump map. What appears to be a collection of spheres is actually a flat grid. The image on the left gives the grid its color, and the middle image is its bump map created with BumpCapture.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
