Normal maps out of a texture

NAIMA

Hello , I was wondering what woudl be your workflow if you wanted to make a Wall texture ....

I mean a realistic one , taking a real image of a brick messy wall from a castle .

You get the texture, you make all the tiling , but then how you do to get a realistic extruding normal map ?

Most of the tools that automate the process get uneven results and sometimes they are good if there are lots of black areas in the intersections but if not then it results in strange ways ... is there some technique to improve and get a realistic normal map like if it was actually made in a zbrush?

SanderDL

I usually make a black and white heightmap in Photoshop. Just grab a brush and paint over the image. Then I generate a normal map from that. Then afterwards I generare a normal from the original picture and just mix them together.

NAIMA

You mean like Having a grayscale from the original texture and the nhighlight the parts u want to extrude and lowlight the ones u want as depressions?

I was doing something like that tracing lines between each brisk then blurring a bit and adding blend effect to create a smoother result so having in the end a sort of web of black and white lines to use as normal map base and then later mix with the other one ...

I wondered if there was a better technique though?

cromadbomber

Check out this tutorial by PhilipK: http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/tilesbricks/tilesbricks.html

It is exactly what you need.

Farfarer

I tend to work up a quick sculpt in Mudbox (or ZBrush if you prefer, but I've got a planar projection shader for Mudbox and it's a bit easier for sculpting tiling textures using it's tiling plane) and bake out normal map from that (really basic - just the big important shapes).

Then throw the texture through Knald and get a normal out of that (for the finer details - stuff that would take ages to sculpt).

And then combine the two together using Vincent Callebaut's Combine Normal plugin for Photoshop.