Greyscale on Paint.net

Hello,
I’m working on a tutorial for textures on Cycles Render on Blender and I’m having a slight problem. From the tutorial that I’m watching, Andrew Price is using Photoshop and changing the texture into a greyscale image for the Bump Map. Now I have Paint.net 4.03 and we (My Dad and I) just added new plug-in’s and I used the Black and White Converter. Will this do for the greyscale for my Bump map?

Any other suggestions will be much appreciated.
Thanks :slight_smile:
gmmonllor

Sure, just pass the texture through a “RGB to BW” node (convertor > RGB to BW) before plugging it into the bump slot to convert it into a “true” grayscale image so that Cycles can best evaluate it. So your node setup should be (bumpmap texture -> RGB to BW -> output)

You can skip the “RGB to BW” node if your image is a true grayscale image (AKA a grayscale image in linear color-space) but I’m not sure that Paint.NET can save to those formats.

Hope it helps.

Holy cow, thank you so much! :slight_smile:

also be aware

Converting a RGB to G and using that image

most images have shading in them ( from the sun or a light )
and this makes them VERY BAD to use as a height map

for example
the SAME DATA
a shaded gray image , then the real heightmap
http://3.t.imgbox.com/N9OJ5if0.jpg http://3.t.imgbox.com/aMQOz8su.jpg