How do you create normal maps for hand-painted textures?

Schrodinger's Backface

Hey there, I've googled around and either this is hard to answer or I'm using all the wrong keywords.

How does one go about creating a normal map for a texture like this one? I've tried using nDo2, but I apparently know a lot less about that workflow than I thought. I just don't get how this artist made this normal map so clean/precise? I'm guessing it was a height to normal or something of the effect, but I definitely need some advice because I'm spinning wheels.

wirrexx

i believe this is the work of jessica dinh. But not quit sure. she apparantly did this by hand using this

wirrexx

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTnaPhONOA"]Hand-painted Normal Map - YouTube[/ame] there you go matey

Schrodinger's Backface

Seriously? What.A.Boss.

Well thanks! This probably answers my question, then.

Edit: Oh shiz, ty for the vid too!

fatihG_

Interesting method.

What I usually do myself though is just paint a custom heightmap, convert it to a normal map and manually edit the channels of the normal map.

That way all I gotta do is paint with black and white (gresyscale) and not worry about the fancy normal map rainbow colors.

timotronprime

I would have thought it would have started as a sculpt, then hand-painted using the normals generated from the high-res sculpt as reference.

Would the results from method in the linked video be "accurate"? This seems to even take more time too.

Cremuss

Woah. I don't know how fast the video is speed up but this should have taken ages to do. All the lasso selection she did...
I agree with bb0x, you better paint a black&white heightmap and use it to generate a normalmap. But I guess she did a great job at handpainting her normal map, the result looks good !

pior

Handpainting normal directions like that takes no longer than regular painting - all you do is paint in light direction, there's nothing crazy about it !

Of course quickly sculpting the rocks would have worked too. Knowing how to do both is very valuable.

ZacD

I still think painting a height map would be quicker and easier for some assets, but since she's mostly using 9 directions/colors, it wasn't too big of a deal for an asset like this.

Octo

Make a heightmap and make a normalmap out of that with for example crazybump.
Or turn it into geometry using a displacement map and bake it however you want.

BARDLER

You could do the Blizzard workflow and use real geometry as your base. Bake out a bunch of different mat caps, including a normal, and then use that base to create the hand painted style.

Schrodinger's Backface

Nice, all of these are good suggestions. My first instinct is always to model and then bake, but I was just really sure that the art from my original post wasn't made through baking and I couldn't figure out how to do it.

I'm probably just gonna try every single method--haha

Thanks, everyone!

Eric Chadwick

Some more tips here, I remember Joe sharing how they did it at 38 Studios
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1745478#post1745478