Bump map on a curved surface

Question

I'm a bit newer to blender, so apologies for probably missing some obvious terms.

I am able to create bump maps for objects with hard corners, but when I try to use them on more spherical objects, I can never get what I want. Iwant the bump map to follow the curves of the shape so they are always perpendicular to the faces. (I think the word "normal" is related to this but using the Normal output from a Texture Coordinate node doesn't work.) Imagine a golf ball, or a strawberry with seed divots.

Here's an image of what I'm talking about. This is a strawberry with the seed divots:

It looks fine, until it's rotated:

and the divots stretch out. Here's my bump image and here are my material nodes:

I've gotten the most milage out of changing the texture coordinate output and rotating/scaling the mapping node, but it's pretty obvious to me that I'm just flailing around and guessing.

I'm sure there's also a correct term for this that I'd love to know.

Answer 1

The problem here is the texture coordinates/projection of the image, you are currently projecting the image in a single direction onto your mesh. You can think of projection working very much like a film projector here. By selecting 'Box' rather than 'Flat' as David suggested, blender will instead project from 6 different directions (as if a cube was surrounding the object, with the texture on each face). This works reasonably well for simple objects, but can still have problems around the where the corners of box that the image is being projected from are.

To improve on the box projection, you need to do what is called UV unwrapping, which essentially creates a flattened version of the surface of your object which can then be used to map 2d details to the surface of your object. You can find a basic overview here