Graphics Programs Reference
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can use to improve on the level of realism we have. It is after all the bumpiness or
roughness found on the surface of real-world objects that determines how sharp or
how blurry their reflections will be. With that in mind, let's go ahead and apply a bump
map to our floor material.
As the diffuse map we have used here is almost a greyscale image, it is perfectly
suited to create a tile and grout effect for us, as the darker outlines of the hexagon
shapes will be rendered in the bump effect as sitting lower in height than the bright
central sections.
The only slight problem we have is that the bitmap used in this default SketchUp ma-
terial is actually embedded inside the materials, definition file, and so cannot be nav-
igated to and selected in the way that we would a regular image file. The good news
is that V-Ray has already given us a way to work around this limitation. As soon as
we created the V-Ray material, this bitmap was extracted from the material definition
and added to a texture cache folder that V-Ray uses on the hard drive.
The bad news is that the cache folder, as is typically the case with all such folders,
is hidden by the operating system. So, without going through the process of unhid-
ing, we cannot easily navigate to it. The other good news is that as long as we know
what we are looking for, we should be able to get the folder to show up in a general
search operation.
The folder that we need to locate is the ChaosGroupTextureCache folder. On
Microsoft Windows Versions 7 and 8, for instance, this folder is located at
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME
HERE\AppData\Local\Temp\ChaosGroupTextureCache . However, as we say,
the actual path isn't really an issue as a quick system search should reveal its loca-
tion to us.
To show how we can use this information to create our bump map, we need to per-
form the following steps in the V-Ray material editor:
1. Select our Floor_Tile_Hexagon_White material and open up the Maps rol-
lout at the bottom of the material controls.
2. In the Maps rollout, put a check in the Bump map option and click on the
map button.
3. In the V-Ray texture editor that appears, access the map type dropdown loc-
ated beneath the Preview button and select the TexBitmap option.
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