Normal Map concerns

riuthamus

How do I avoid this with my normal maps:



I know you are suppose to make normal maps from a high poly model ( which I do not have right now ) so that might be part of the issue. The second issue is that I have a diffuse map and this model only. How to solve this, without me having to go in manually and color over the edges!! :P thanks for any advice you can offer

Diffuse Map:


Normal Map:

Brian "Panda" Choi

Did you just extract the normals from your diffuse?

riuthamus

yeah, like i said i dont have a high poly mesh to make the stuff i need to get the muscle detail. The muscle detail comes only from the diffuse.

BARDLER

riuthamus wrote: »

yeah, like i said i dont have a high poly mesh to make the stuff i need to get the muscle detail. The muscle detail comes only from the diffuse.

That isn't really how normal maps work. A normal map needs to take into account the vert normals of the lowpoly when being baked. You have no way of taking into account your lowpoly vert normals by simply trying to convert your diffuse into normal map.

I don't think there is a way to hack a normal map onto the model to get it to shade properly without making a proper highpoly.

Noors

Yeah only Pior has succeded to paint normap maps on a 3d object ^^
Also normal map is uv dependent, so colors might be completly different at eash side of a uv seam. There is actually no way to paint normal maps in a 2d software besides of a flat plane.
The clean way is to make an high poly version and sculpt it.
One dirty way could be to put your diffuse as bump and bake a normal map from it . That would give you some sort of relief with no seams i guess.

arrangemonk

tesselate the model and dispace it with your map, that should work

EarthQuake

Yeah, really just not how normal maps work for this sort of thing. Converting a painted bump map into a normal map is great for things like textures, patterns, chipped edges, etc. But its extremely difficult to do what you're trying to do with a hand painted map.

You would probably spend less time if you sculpted a high poly and baked that down vs all the time it will take you to accurately paint a height map, and then hack that into a working normal map.

A baked normal map will replace the mesh normals of the lowpoly, with a painted bump converted normal map you're always going to have smoothing issues, and likely seams and other problems.

riuthamus

I was actually able to resolve the issue by using 3dcoat v4. I imported the uvmap and had it provide the padding. once that was done it blurred the lines out to the edges and from there the normal maps edges are unseen. I have added creating high poly models to our pipeline for now but this resolved the current issue! thanks