Help with Normal Blending

kaspurr

So this is my first Designer project and I was having a great time up until now. So I am trying to separate the normal information of the nails and the wood grain of this floor texture I am making and I am stuck, basically I would like to mask out certain areas from being affected by the other set of normal information. Does anyone know how I can do this? 

throttlekitty

Use the part where you created the shapes for the nail heads, and run that out as a line to your normal blending. Ideally you'll have a mask that fits inside those holes, blend that with a uniform color of 127,127,255 (flat normal color), and layer that on top of the normal map from the wood.

kaspurr

Hey thanks for replying so fast that did the trick exactly, what's your opinion on the texture? I feel like it needs more flag in the grain but I was having a hard time with it. Thanks again! 

throttlekitty

I think it looks great pulled back! I think it could do with either a bit of tightening up for the planks shape or adding a bit more dirt/grit between them. The short ends of planks would realistically be cut flat and not have much of a visible bevel, but sometimes it's better to stylize things for game art, your call there.

This isn't a huge nitpick, but it's always nice to see textures that don't look "overlaid", where the wood grain pattern carries across planks. I'm still a novice in many ways in Designer, so I don't know the best way to break up the pattern per plank.

Side note, I wasn't sure what you meant by flag so i did a search and found this great resource. I still don't know what you mean The grain seems ok to me, it could maybe be fattened up a bit. Sometimes for thin black line types of patterns, I blur it a little, blur it again a little if it needs it, then blend that back into the original. Sometimes it's tricky to get looking right however.

kaspurr

Ah "flag" is what my carpenter dad calls the swirly grain so I will be sending him that reference lol.

And I agree with your point about the overlaid look, I think some more creative masking will solve that. And for the short ends for the sake of readability from a distance I might leave it but I am sure I could just isolate and adjust the bevel if it begins to keep me up at night, I am just using this for a floor. So many of the things I wanted to work on can be fixed with normal masking so thank you very much!