Tools for Photo < - > Bumpmaps?

[Mneme]

Does anyone know of any tools that study a picture with shadows to generate an approximate bumpmap?

For example:

[Hungry4info]

If "approximate" is your aim, you can just use the texture as its own bump map. Works passably.

[duds26]

If you want to have such maps, you cannot start from a picture.
You need to start with an actual bumpmap.

Anyway, it's better to use normal maps instead of bump maps.
(Internally, in celestia, bumpmaps are automatically converted into normal maps.)

I know that some professor has made a tool for extracting height maps from pictures with the light and shadow.
However you need three pictures of the same object where the shadows are unique (different) of each picture.

[Mneme]

I'm not needing them for use in Celestia specifically although such a tool would also be useful for certain add-ons I'm working on.

[John Van Vliet]

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[Mneme]

I read your Dione bumpmap post actually. I didn't understand it. It appeared that you already had a bumpmap from somewhere, not that you had generated it from the image in question. On these forums, how long is one expected to search through posts that one is not making sense of, or Google, before asking what seems a potentially simple question? I scanned several forums and one or two posts that seemed possibly relevant. I'm sorry I didn't look at everything nor find your personal website.

I am not a programmer or an astronomer or a photographer. I am a writer and an artist and I tinker with computer games (hence the need for a heightmap). I apologize if my queries directed toward whatever programmers, astronomers, and/or photographers might read this forum and might be willing and able to help bothered you or wasted your time. I believe my noobish question was phrased politely? No worries. I will look elsewhere and avoid this forum in the future unless I have something to contribute.

Peace.

[selden]

While I can't apologize for John's rude behavior, please don't think that all of us here are like that. If there are other questions you might have, please do post them. Others will be glad to answer.

[John Van Vliet]

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[John Van Vliet]

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[Fenerit]

Does anyone know of any tools that study a picture with shadows to generate an approximate bumpmap?

For Gimp 2.6 http://www.gimp.org/ there is a normalmap plug-in http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/.

Quote from the page:

Height source. Use an average of the RGB components or the alpha channel as the height source in the generation of the normals.

Premise that isn't the corrected procedure, for your case, the black shadows of the craters will be render as lower fields (RGB 0.0.0) and the white(s) as height . Do not exaggerated with the scale, though, since will be hightfielded also the shadows of the mountains, that arent'n lower field, of course.

P.S.
John, with 7zip all is right. Probably the winzip of mine is too old to correctly handle the png compression.

[John Van Vliet]

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