If this is the “shot you want” (extreme zoom), you can rearrange your UV so that the zoomed in portion is covered by more pixels.Īlternatively you can use a painted mask (resolution not that important) and paint in effects from procedurally created bumps which is waaay more harder (then it’s floating point accuracy issues) to get into resolution and “bit depth” problems. Cubic interpolation helps along the edges, but doesn’t smooth it out completely. Any image based bump map will look crappy when you zoom in. However, it doesn’t matter how big the resolution of the bump map is if you zoom in past the “pixel information density” (not sure what to call it), and by the zoom level in the image it appears you are well past this point. As long as the bump map texture is attached to the material of the source object it will work. Blender internal can use GLSL for baking so you can bake normal as well as black and white bump maps from one object to another.

The best thing you can do is to increase the contrast of/normalize your image and then blur it. This bakes the normal map in Object Space, but most normal maps are in tangent space. A normal map will show pixel issues only where the gradient changes, whereas a bump map will show pixel issues for each “elevation”. In order to depict a normal at some angle, a bumpmap needs a continuous gradient whereas a normal map needs a single color. Is it just a bump thing? Because normals, for example, don’t seem pixelated to me