How to improve bumpmapping

[Hesekiel2517]

Hey there,

i need to create a material with a very fine bump map, but i can't achieve the look I'm after. It looks to me that bump mapping is behaving a little weird. I can get far better results using displacement (which needs UVs and can't deal with procedural textures without baking). I know that displacement can produce more detailed results on edges, but should't bump produce similar results on surfaces?

I found this topic in the forum and it seems to describe just the problem I am encountering:
viewtopic.php?f=87&t=71721

Are there any news on this or this there another method to get better Bump/Normal Mapping?

Thank you in advance

[SSmolak]

I and others reported many times that there is something wrong with bump. Most of the time it is little moved ( translated ) compared to other channels and produce to harsh results compared to normal or displacement mapping.

Example thread : viewtopic.php?f=32&t=81619&hilit=bump

[Hesekiel2517]

I hope they are going to look into this. At the moment bump seems to be more or less unusable to me.

[SSmolak]

Generally I found that bump looks much better when it is blurred. But due that we don't have real blur node the workaround is to connect it to Baking texture node with low samples - it works like blur but not perfect.

[sethRichardson]

Hey there,

i need to create a material with a very fine bump map, but i can't achieve the look I'm after. It looks to me that bump mapping is behaving a little weird. I can get far better results using displacement (which needs UVs and can't deal with procedural textures without baking). I know that displacement can produce more detailed results on edges, but should't bump produce similar results on surfaces?

I found this topic in the forum and it seems to describe just the problem I am encountering:
viewtopic.php?f=87&t=71721

Are there any news on this or this there another method to get better Bump/Normal Mapping?

Thank you in advance

This should be fixed in the new 2023 versions. This is an issue that has plagued me for years in Octane and put me off from using it as my primary engine. Any time you work on small scale objects like 500mm and need a fine bump for product plastics like mold tech octane bump would shit the bed. Where Vray/Redshift handled it beautifully and maintained detail.

However after testing the latest versions that added the bump channel that problem now appears to be fixed and you can shrink a map down pretty small and still get an accurate bump. So yay for that.