Improve details on older model

NAIMA

Hello , since I am always progressing and improving my techs ( I hope ) , I realized now that the zbrushing I did for an armor model in skyrim has not really good results because the z depth of the carvings I added on the details shoudl have been much more deeper and strong to be visible ingame .
Altough it does look good in zbrush , it looks pretty washed out and not really standing out ingame ... now the normal map has the details in it but it just doesn't shows off much in the engine .. .so I was wondering if the best way would be to just redo the whole detailing in zbrush , then redo the texture , or instead operate somehow with photoshop and some manual work? Is there a way to increase the Zdepth detail of a normal map on the details only?

BARDLER

You could try a couple things. You could try to multiply the normal map over itself using photoshop and this technique. http://vimeo.com/8025133. You could also try to go into zbursh do a mask by cavity so all the depth you sculpted will be masked, invert it, and do a negative inflate to add some more depth. Last way would be the good old fashion way and re do it and go over the details again to make them deeper.

.morph3us

The R and G CHannel hold all the zdepth information you need.
Just go into the channels and copy them into own layers.
Now duplicate them and invert the duplicates.
Now change the blending mode to something that suits your needs (lighten most of t he time does it for me)
also, put another layer beneath the lowest one with a 128 flat grey

You can now take this into nDo/crazybump/nvidia filters and create a deeper version. you might loose details, but you can get them back by overlaying this new map over the old, shallow one.

CheeseOnToast

Bear in mind that a normal map is concerned with direction, not depth as such. Giving your carvings more curvature or a broader bevel will have more of an effect than making them deeper.