"UDN" and "Whiteout" normal map blending Photoshop actions
polycounter lvl 19
Hey guys,
After doing a fair amount of research into different ways to blend normal maps I wanted to find a fast and easy way to blend normal maps directly in Photoshop. I decided to give it a go with creating my own actions for this. Some methods seemed to far fetched due to the limitations of Photoshop actions. Color clipping/clamping being a big issue. I managed to create the actions for the UDN and Whiteout way as described in this article.
Since we're talking about blending normal maps normalization is necessary and this is done with the xNormal Normal map normalization filter. In other words, xNormal is a dependency. If you want to you can bypass this by disabling the "Normalize Normal Map" step in the actions. It's the very last step.
The actions contain a descriptive popup when running them, you can easily remove this by disabling or deleting the first step in the action called "stop".
To control the strength of the detail normals use the detail normals layer opacity. The action takes this into account. If you want to get a strength above 100% then just combine the detail normals several times into the previous result.
You can get the actions here.
After doing a fair amount of research into different ways to blend normal maps I wanted to find a fast and easy way to blend normal maps directly in Photoshop. I decided to give it a go with creating my own actions for this. Some methods seemed to far fetched due to the limitations of Photoshop actions. Color clipping/clamping being a big issue. I managed to create the actions for the UDN and Whiteout way as described in this article.
Since we're talking about blending normal maps normalization is necessary and this is done with the xNormal Normal map normalization filter. In other words, xNormal is a dependency. If you want to you can bypass this by disabling the "Normalize Normal Map" step in the actions. It's the very last step.
The actions contain a descriptive popup when running them, you can easily remove this by disabling or deleting the first step in the action called "stop".
To control the strength of the detail normals use the detail normals layer opacity. The action takes this into account. If you want to get a strength above 100% then just combine the detail normals several times into the previous result.
You can get the actions here.
Replies
Could you also tell me how to mix or combine AO and Cavity maps of different UV sets? The sets which had a common UV space in the beginning but split into parts because of assigning various materials for painting purpose in Substance Painter
I guess depending on how you mix together your normal maps you might choose different approaches. Either multiply for a more pronounced/darker effect or like a manual lerp I guess to retain 1.0(100%) weighting.