Info on how to make Normal Maps.

[Shroomblaze]

I just found this site today after searching for a better way to do normal maps. It has some good info that will give you more insight on how normal maps are made. Before I used to just run my main diffuse through a program called pix plant and make the normal map as best I could and then cut and pasting different normals saves at different settings and piecing it together to look good. Problem is that you get a lot of image noise when doing this. This site explains more about how to get rid of the noise by making a normal height template first and then running that through the normal creating application you use or filter in gimp / photoshop.

I also found some information that might help you to create a quicker normal height map than making it all by hand. What you can do is in photoshop or gimp, is copy one of the color channels, red/green/blue which ever looks the best for a normal height template and then do an image adjustments and alter the levels to get more solid colors and reduce the noise a lot by making the parts more black/white/grey by washing out the white parts and darkening in the black parts.

Then what I did after that was copy and paste the parts that I really wanted to show up on the normal by selecting an area, hitting copy and paste so it pastes right in that same spot on a new layer. repeated this process all over. This way you can really get rid of the noise in the middle areas that you don't plan to raise up.

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/textures/how-not-to-make-normal-maps-from-photos-or-images.php

 

[templeofdoom]

Nice find - this is the article that made me start trying to do more height map generation and painting them by hand with varying adjustments. I've tried a lot of methods at making normal maps and I think for whatever reason making the height maps from each layer by using color adjustments and adding in details by hand is the best quality I've seen so far. I've used several stand alone normal map programs that all work great but the settings are robust and it takes a while to really learn how to use them on some of the programs which I haven't had time to dedicate to. I use the plugin for GIMP and usually do a mix of using levels and hand painting grayscale layers to try to get normal working good. I have a lot to learn but I really think this process got me better results than just using stand alones.

The other thing I've been trying to practice is more is using blurring layers with increasing/decreasing opacities each successive layer or "high pass filters" to get more depth on my height maps before running the normal map filter.

 

[Mr Maison]

I agree, nice find!

 

[Zed68]

A must-read !!

 

[Shelltoe]

imho the easiest way to understand why a normal map looks shitty is to understand what a normal map actually is.
while the tutorial is better than most i'm still not a huge fan of it for several reasons but whatever.

here's another rather interessting link