My First Normal Maps - Creepy Victorian City Level
polycounter lvl 17
I had an idea for a first-person survival horror game that takes place in an 'empty' Victorian city. Seemed like a good enough time to take a crack at normal maps, starting with some cobblestone.
I started off doing a bit of sculpting using a Blob/Inflate brush, making sure that each stone had a bit of overhang so it had some shadow:
I'd started from the bottom-left corner, and worked my way to the center, and the duplicated the plane and moved it to the other side, and filled in the rest using that as a border, so it was seamless:
Next, I made a square plane and positioned it at the center of the sculpt, making sure that each opposite edge would match up. I baked the normals and AO onto said plane, and used the latter as the base for the textures:
I darkened the AO a bit and went over a random assortment of stones with various values to give it some variety. Then I filled in the spaces with brown and played with a few filters:
I then took a copy of that, made the brown part black, and increased the contrast of the underlying AO, going over it with additive white where I thought each stone would be worn smooth from being trodden upon, and got the specular:
Everything put together, and this is the end result:
How did I do?
I started off doing a bit of sculpting using a Blob/Inflate brush, making sure that each stone had a bit of overhang so it had some shadow:
I'd started from the bottom-left corner, and worked my way to the center, and the duplicated the plane and moved it to the other side, and filled in the rest using that as a border, so it was seamless:
Next, I made a square plane and positioned it at the center of the sculpt, making sure that each opposite edge would match up. I baked the normals and AO onto said plane, and used the latter as the base for the textures:
I darkened the AO a bit and went over a random assortment of stones with various values to give it some variety. Then I filled in the spaces with brown and played with a few filters:
I then took a copy of that, made the brown part black, and increased the contrast of the underlying AO, going over it with additive white where I thought each stone would be worn smooth from being trodden upon, and got the specular:
Everything put together, and this is the end result:
How did I do?
Replies
Also what engine are you rendering this in right now?
Added some more variation to the colors on the diffuse and some of the specular values, and also darkened and roughed-up the spec. TRIED to make it rougher, at least.