Help with Crazybump problem

NAIMA

Hello , I was trying crazybump to make a stone wall texture , but to enhance the bump of the wallset and the shape I made an outline of the wallblocks and in B and white I have made a normal map and then I overlayed on this the other normal map extracted from the normal picture .... this is the process... altugh it looked good in crazybump I have imported in skyrim and it looks like now the directional shader that makes the snow , wich seems to pick the directions of the normal map , decided to choose the normal map inclination from the left rather than the up to place the snow ... what is wrong and how can I fix it?

JamesWild

The snow is indeed basically a directional light with a hard cutoff (presumably if( world(normal).Z > 0.3 ) white else color ?) which looks really ugly in some caves...

Try putting it in an indoor scene and testing it with some point lights. I think the channels might be swapped here but unsure. I presume Crazybump is smart enough to renormalize the map after adding the noise to it.

NAIMA

I do not add noise in crazybump but in the game editor , I need to tweak the textures in photoshop I guess but not sure how to ...

JamesWild

You overlaid the detail normal map in the editor? Not used Skyrim's editor much but you can do that? From the way it looks, looks you did it in Crazybump.

I guess the tangents might be wrong on the wall.

I've noticed that chests with snow on remain static when rotated. Have you rotated the object in the Skyrim editor?

NAIMA

no I created the same way the two textures in xrazybump and then overlayed them in ps ... yes if u rotate it gets the Ztop on well made normals of objects , but I need to tweak the texture in PS ...

JamesWild

If you just want a dirt cheap way of turning the normals 90 degrees swap the red and green channels. It's not a "correct" thing to do and should never be part of a "proper" pipeline, but should work.

NAIMA

Swap? How? That is not a symetrical texture ... Or u mean somethingelse? And I dont want to turn snow 90 but 45 to have snow from top rather than from a side ...

JamesWild

But the snow is 90 degrees away from where it should be... Are you using a translator? I think something's getting lost in translation.

Take the red channel, and put it in the green channel. Take the (previous) green channel, and put it in the red channel. The left/right axis now corresponds to up/down and vice versa. A bit of a hack, not something that should be used in a pipeline, but will rotate the normals 90 degrees so the snow comes from the top or bottom instead of the side.

NAIMA

but I do know but I can't do it in photoshop it doesnt allow me to paste a new picture inside the r or g channel how do I swap?

NAIMA

Ok I did it , making a swap by duplicatng , renaming and reconverting back to rgb ... seemed to work thanks ...

St.Sabath

I know you solved it already,but be aware that if you overlay a normalmap on top of another normal map in PS,you'll destroy the blue channel of the texture.
What you can do is copy both blue channels from the seperate normalmaps into the blue channel of the combined normalmap(use screen mode to combine the blue channels in a seperate doc ,merge down,and then copy/paste into the new blue channel,or use a action script to do it,incase you need it in the future)

NAIMA

Whats the blue channel for ? Whats screen mode?