Intro
This is just the way I personally make bump maps for Sims 4 items. It might work for you, or it might not. In any case, I hope it's helpful!
Tools
Photoshop (or any other editing program that can open and edit DDS files AND has a support for RGB and alpha channels (this is important))
Nvidia DDS Plug-in for PS (or any other tool that can generate normal maps out of image files!)
Sims 4 Studio
Process
Preparing your texture
You might want your texture to be on the background layer in Photoshop. This is important because otherwise the Normal Map filter gives weird results. You might also want the background to be darker than the texture elements.
Cropping your texture
I don't know much about how bump maps work in Sims 4, but the maps for clothes are cropped to the lower half of the CAS texture, and have the dimensions of 1024 by 1024
Normal map filter
Nothing special here, you can see the settings I have from the screenshot, I'm not sure if they differ much from the default aside from the "scale" which I cranked up a little. It makes the normal and consequently the bump map more pronounced. Depends on how crunchy you want the result to be!
Then open sims 4 bump map, and go back to your normal map. There, go to the channels tab. It has 3 or 4 channels in it: red, green, blue, and sometimes alpha.
copy the red channel from the normal map you made into the ALPHA channel of the map
copy the green channel from the map you made into the RGB channel of the bump map
save
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profit
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