Normal Maps in Mari - what do you need ?

Campi

Hi,
following a request that came up for Mari (http://mari.ideascale.com/a/dtd/More-parameters-for-Height-as-Normal/381381-15287)
I want to rewrite Mari's Normal Map Layer ("Height as normal"). Unfortunately I rarely use normal maps in my job so I don't really know what to look out for. It would help if some game artists could list some things they feel they are missing there.

Off the top of my head I would try to add options to lengthen the bevel, flip x and y channel. Possibly some simple presets for different engines like Unreal etc. although someone would need to give me more specifics what I need to look out for apart from the way RGB Channels are assembled.

Thanks.
Jens

artquest

Hi, for us game guys we usually don't paint our normals as height maps. But if we do we do it using a plug in for photoshop called ndo 2. If you can give some of the same parameters as ndo by quixel that would be pretty awesome.

FelixL

You should look into tools like crazybump, knald or bitmap2material.
Lengthening the bevel would be a great start!

Presets for different engines... how would you do that? Mari's internal tangent space doesn't match any engines. I convert the normal channel to world space (with tangent to world) and convert it via handplane or other tools. If you can reverse-engineer handplane and integrate the conversion to mari, that would be great. But not super important, imo.