XNormal Height>Normal map step problem

Spiffy

I'm having a problem when I use XNormal to convert a height map to a normal map, the generated map has stepping:

(Even with higher smoothing applied I get the same result, just a weaker normal map)
I created the map with Gimp with the solid noise generator, I'm not sure if this is an issue with Gimp or XNormal
I thought about applying the height map to a plane and baking the plane (the traditional way) but the Plane has the same stepping so I'm guessing it would give the same result.

powl

Your height map should be at 16 bit colour depth per channel. At the moment xnormal has only 256 different shades to work with, which isnt a lot when you have such a smooth height map.

Cheers

EarthQuake

I would use knald for this.

Spiffy

Knald crashes on startup, I cant find any fixes for it

And I cant use Gimp to generate the clouds because it refuses to generate in 16 bits, I'm not sure what to do, Even if I copy the image to Photoshop and save the image at 16 bits the stepping still occurs because the cloud was generated in another mode.

I can generate similar maps in Blender and get a smooth 16 bit map but it doesn't have the option to make it tile-able, Unless someone has used Gimp and knows how to fix this, I'm stuck with Blender.

EarthQuake

generate twice as large, open in photoshop, set to 16 bit, size down half, this should do some dithering on it at least and might help

aso, try ndo or crazybump if you can't get knald to work

Spiffy

Managed to get Ndo working and it did the conversion perfectly, Didn't even have to do any scaling or smoothing.

Thanks a bunch guys.