Bent Normal baking

fire67

Hi there,

I have a low poly mesh and a normal map and I also need the bent normal. Does anyone know a tool or a way to calculate and bake bent normal without having the high poly mesh ?

Thanks you very much !

fire67

Any idea ?

Bartalon

If you're talking about the traditional bent normal which contains AO information baked into the normal map, then I'm at a loss.  I'd actually be interested to know if that sort of map is still used outside of Valve.

If you're talking about xNormal's bent normal, it's exactly the same as a world-space normal map, which can be done in handplane, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer using only a LP and tangent space normal map; and probably a few other programs as well (but handplane is freely available to all).

fire67

Thank you for your answer !
From what I understand of the white paper I am reading, they are building bent normal using Maya Turtle but this doesn't seems related to anything I know.
This is for a custom shader on Unity and I've achieved to generate some bent normals using different software but the output is always different and I have some difficulties about interpreting them inside my shader.

FishMan

New versions of UE4 are also using bent normals for better AO and for reflection occlusion...
Here is the link:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/BentNormalMaps/

And I've got a similar question... Is it possible to generate bent normals using tangent space normal map and a low poly mesh?

Because if you do hard surface then sometimes the baking process can be really tricky. So you have to manually fix something in photoshop, or compose different bake passes. I think there is no need to explain that it's impossible to repeat this work twice, some stuff just can't be baked in one pass.

There are a multiple ways to bake AO using normal map for examble. So is there any way to bake bent normals from a low poly?

Also Valve was using radiocity normal maps, well at least this is how they called in XNormal...

LOL. I even still have this screenshot, which was done in 2008 (omgg! Nine years ago ) I was experimenting with normal maps back that days. Not sure that I did everything right. But I've noticed that bent normals have some funny gradients so if you use then as usual normal maps you get some interesting self shadowing effect ("true" Self-Shadowed normal maps which was used by Valve are on the right):