Discussion - Industry Experience - Normal Maps vs Time
Hey guys, I am writing a report for my Uni course based around the creation of normal maps. Now to my knowledge there are 2 main methods to creating a normal map.
A) You can generate a normal map from a height map,
You can create a highpoly model and bake the information out from it,
As far as I am aware these are the 2 methods we have for creating normal map and if there are any more please let me know.
Now the question a want to gather research about is this:
During a games production, be it retail game or a free mod. What method of normal map creation did you fine gave you the best results, while keeping to your schedule.
If any of that dose make sense below is a few examples of what I mean:
This is my defuse texture for a door decal:
This normal map was baked from a high poly model in Maya:
This normal map was generated with Crazybump using a custom high map I created:
My last example was created with Crazybump again this time though I simply desaturated the image and messed with the levels:
By looking at these 3 examples my first 2 example I would say are a much better normal map. But these two obviously took me much longer to create then my third example which took about 5 minutes. So in a real game development situation, did anyone find that they had plenty of time to create the highest quality of normal maps? Or did you find yourself having to settle for a lesser quality of normal map?
Any feedback and answer would be amazing.
Thx guys.
A) You can generate a normal map from a height map,
You can create a highpoly model and bake the information out from it,As far as I am aware these are the 2 methods we have for creating normal map and if there are any more please let me know.
Now the question a want to gather research about is this:
During a games production, be it retail game or a free mod. What method of normal map creation did you fine gave you the best results, while keeping to your schedule.
If any of that dose make sense below is a few examples of what I mean:
This is my defuse texture for a door decal:
This normal map was baked from a high poly model in Maya:
This normal map was generated with Crazybump using a custom high map I created:
My last example was created with Crazybump again this time though I simply desaturated the image and messed with the levels:
By looking at these 3 examples my first 2 example I would say are a much better normal map. But these two obviously took me much longer to create then my third example which took about 5 minutes. So in a real game development situation, did anyone find that they had plenty of time to create the highest quality of normal maps? Or did you find yourself having to settle for a lesser quality of normal map?
Any feedback and answer would be amazing.
Thx guys.
Replies
for me
Use the method that gives you the best results while keeping within your schedule.
Multiple times I've spent some extra time to make some buildings and props looking stellar, just to see them later placed out of player's reach or in a dark area, where all the detail is lost.
as a general rule, you always try to get the best result in the shortest time.
for something that small and simple as a door you would almost always go with crazybump/NDO. for characters you almost always have to bake the normals from a highpoly.
if you have the time, you could bake all your normals, or if you don´t have much time you coul simply skip the normal creation process.
so to answer your question; in most AAA productions smaller assets that are rather simple in structure get generated maps, while more complex or important assets and characters get baked normal maps.
baked normal map can look great.
normal map made from height map can also look really good.
but diffuse turned straight into a normal map will usually give you results so poor that it's hard to justify using such method.
it might actually work if diffuse is noiseless and homogeneous or if somehow things that stick out are brighter and cavities are dark.
it also can look nice when mixed with height map based normal map, to give it a little bit of surface detail.
but i wouldn't recommend using it if the only reason is that it saves 5 minutes. it's not like height templates take hours to make.
something to note is that door would be very quick to model in max/maya. So NDO might not be faster.
and on a side note, of course it took you longer to model it out. Your using maya :P
at sp stuff like that is usually generated in ndo. fast and returns results just as good as making a high poly without having to spend the time making it
to the contrary!
for hard surface i aggree, but i had to replicate normale maps for existing photosourced tiled textures and there is simply no way to replicate the detail without massive effort.
combining a rough, handsculpted normal with the photosourced gave pretty good results.
so don´t condemn this stuff so quickly.
yes, but you know better. You've got to paint a lot of fences before you go to the Karate Tournament.
As far as what you're going to use in a production environment, it depends entirely on what kind of work you're doing.
If you need to make guns for a military shooter, there's no way in hell you could get away with using Crazybump or nDo for anything except the smallest grungy details like scratches or shallow wood grain. Same with most environment art and general hard surface stuff.
If you're working on something more organic, like a bunch of tiling ground textures, you can usually get away with using something like Crazybump because it's not super critical that you get a normal map that's 100% correct for the given geometry. Even then, though, it's always a good idea to have some sort of baked info from a high-poly source for the larger details in a large number of tiling textures.
If you're working on characters and you use Crazybump for anything except extremely small details, I'll literally reach through the internet and smack you across the face.
Basicaly doing what option two is. Going into photoshop, makeing a sort of height map using gradients, flat black and white shapes, and generating the normal map using crazybump or something else.
If you look at this example, near the bottom, you can see how much you can get done with just painting out a height map.
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/9046/normalmapminitutrf7.jpg