https://sims4studio.com/thread/1148/bump-mapping-tutorial-photoshop-cs?page=1

Hello everyone! So I've heard recently, alot of things going about, creators looking how to make their own bump maps with Photoshop! Today I am going to show you exactly that. Remember that you can use this method to make bump maps for anything you make in the game. I would like to extend credit to Maya for letting us use her beautiful Jeweled Ruched Dress in this tutorial!

Thank you!

Before we get started, I would like to explain to you what a bump map does. A bump map gives detail, and definition to a seemingly flat surface, as well as in some cases determining how the light interacts with the object.

Lets get started! Note: this tutorial assumes that you know already how to make your own textures, and will only be covering the creation of the bump map for that texture.

Open Photoshop, and then open the base texture for your item. In this case, I am using the texture from Maya's, Jeweled Ruched Dress. your going to make a marquee around the bottom portion of the image, pressing shift while making the square, to make it perfectly proportional, starting in one of the bottom corners, so it looks like this. To select the marquee tool, press M.

Now you are going to crop the image. Go to: image - crop. Now it should look like this.

Great! We are already half-way done! Next you emboss the image, go to Filter - Stylize - Emboss. Now depending on what you are making, or how much definition you want, you can fiddle with these settings for the desired result. Usually with clothing, we will want a low to medium height. It also depends on which direction the strokes, or textures are. if the textures are mostly horizontal then you will want to set it at a 90 degree angle, if they are mostly vertical, then 0. For this particular texture most of the lines are horizontal so i am going to set it at a 90 degree angle, the height to 3 pixels, and the amount to 40%. As shown below.

sometimes you may have to clean up the image a bit, if you look closely at the back of the dress, you can see that there are some dark lines that need to be removed.

we simply take out the brush tool, by pressing B, press alt and clone the gray color from the background, and color over the really dark lines, so the image looks like this afterward.

The next step is to go to the alpha channel, accessible at the bottom right of the screen, select the entire channel with the marquee tool by pressing ctrl + A, and right click, then fill, and in the settings select 50% gray.

Now you click save as, and name the file bump. The next step is to import it to studio. Go to the warehouse tab, and replace this image, usually at the top of the list. The imported image should look like this.