Tiling textures and unique normal maps

deohboeh

I am new to environment art and just had an idea for reusing tiling textures for furniture and other environment pieces. Why not generate a unique normal map for the piece of furniture or environment piece, with bevels and chamfers and custom sculpted detail. Then blend the tiling normal map on top of it for detail. This reduces the amount of geometry you may use to represent the chamfer or bevel while still giving you smooth edges.

Do environment artists currently use this technique? Is the draw call versus polycount wrong performance wise?

ZacD

It's called using a detail normal map, people have been using it for things like fabric for a while now.

deohboeh

ZacD wrote: »

It's called using a detail normal map, people have been using it for things like fabric for a while now.

Oh.. Thanks for the reply Zac. I'm new to tiling and making seamless textures for environments. Do you know of any tutorials with tips and tricks like this that can utilised to create better environs?

Joost

For simple objects it would be more efficient to use chamfers than having a unique normal map. I think normal maps are a bit overused( for simple objects), you can achieve nice results with just a single chamfer and face weighted normals. Also saves a lot of time, especially if you're using quad chamfer.

You should probably post questions like this in the technical talk forum btw.