R7 Exploring the mystery of bump/displacement/normal maps

[cestes001]

It seems like Cycles is totally ignoring my choices of bitmaps. No matter what image file I specify, I get the base color with no texture. The only one that seems to work (sort of) is the “Water rippled” selection from the library.

For example, the attached .jpg seems like it should somehow alter the look of the ground plane, but the attached screen capture shows what I’m getting as a result. I’ve tried it both as a PBR and as a custom material with the same result:

[nathanletwory (Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory)]

What you are seeing with bumps is logged as: RH-79944 Bump map on ground plane imperceptible

Normal maps will look better. For instance like this.

That is using the Deep Water on GP material I posted a couple of years ago here

Raft on Sea

[Empty Raft on Sea - ground plane] [Empty Raft on Sea - ocean mesh] I made a simple scene for illustrating answer to question by @Robb in Rendering in V7 : Raft.zip (17.5 MB). The first render is using the ground plane with the material Deep Water on GP.rmtl (514.1 KB) applied. The second render is using a mesh created using the ocean modifier in Blender 2.91.0. The raft is mainly subd cylinders to get quickly rounded edges. I applied the Brazilian Palm material from the Rhino library. B…

If the waves look tiny you will want to increase the size setting, like I did in the screen capture in this post.

[cestes001]

Teriffic. I can’t say how many years I’ve struggled with this (mainly out of embarassment).

Great response. Thx.