Mysterious and Horrifying normals

[Balto-the-Wolf-Dog]

2 minutes ago, nli2work said:

the 2nd one isn't exactly correct either. but at least it won't give you the dark flat look from the first one, the one that looks more violet than blue. I suggest doing some more reading up on Normal Maps before attempting to utilize it. Specifically Tangent Space Normal Maps, which has the characteristic Blue back ground. There's maybe 1 in 1 million occasion where you attempt to create a normal map by editing RGB channels manually, the other 999999999 times it's tantamount to mental suicide.

The short of it is the R channel pushes the pixel normals left/right; G channel pushes up/down; blue pushes in/out. Problem is every 3d package and game engine have some different way of implementing Tangent Normals and some use R-255 for Right, some use R-255 for Left, same goes for Green. And for the most part, game engines don't even care about the Blue channel. Good thing is game engines can handle the internal conversions it needs as long as you give it the correct normal map.

Yeah, that particular one wasn't successful. What gave me the successful result was that image run through the website you sent me to generate this

I didn't realize there was an option for generating these things beyond projecting from high detailed meshes, so I figured I'd take a shot at improvising. Knowing this is around changes everything.

[nli2work]

there some good normal map generators some are free. if you got Photoshop look for nDo, which is free, but increasingly hard to find ebcause it's old. nDo2 is fairly cheap. CrazyBump is free. or use this online https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

looks like I still have nDo zip https://www.dropbox.com/s/ryektyb0dzjw24x/nDo.zip?dl=0; 

Edited April 2, 2016 by nli2work

[Balto-the-Wolf-Dog]

2 minutes ago, nli2work said:

there some good normal map generators some are free. if you got Photoshop look for nDo, which is free, but increasingly hard to find ebcause it's old. nDo2 is fairly cheap. CrazyBump is free. or use this online https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

Yeah, that one seems to be golden. I also used it for a quick window map. The effect is fairly subtle but it gives them a little more dimension if you look between my successful image and the previous ones

[InsaneDruid]

I like (and use) Shadermap for generating normal maps out of greyscale heightmaps. Picked V2 as they where discounting it before V3 release. Fast, easy, good preview capabilities, can handle complete and separate projects (all my proton+launchpads normal maps are generated in one project file). Can batch render normals when the sources are updated.. Can bake normals from meshes, too.

[Vorg]

Gimp also has a Normal map plug in, but the .dds export plugin messes up normal maps. you'd have to save as a .png. There is also some talk (a year old now) about the next version of Gimp supporting 32 bit color depth which would be good for making the grey scale bump maps. But it's been in testing for a long time. Seems to have stalled.