Creating good normal map from 2d texture

Bladers

all week long, i have been trying to create normals of bricks using textures i made. its impossible.

I then tried to see if i would replicate from other peoples made normal maps.
all the results from NDO2, Crazymap, Knald comes out shitty.

I'm losing my mind here ppl. someone help
how do ppl create good normals from bricks.
or do i have to go learn zbrush and start sculpting.

sargentcrunch

n/a

Shrike

understand that all those programs try to read height information from your texture
as your eye would (shadows and light) and is only reading greyscale.
The problem with photographs is that the colors/lightness do not represent height,
they represent height and the materials/colors, which the programs can not differentiate between.

Start by converting your texture in greyscale to see how the height looks.
Eleminate all the false lightness information that is not defined from height. (black and white layer filter is great for the start)

Then modify it so the height is readable to your eye as you want it to be interpreted by the program. You can also generate in passes and combine them in photoshop later.

(Select> Color range is one of the most important tools for this stuff)

Creating strong black / white masks to generate stuff from often works well, but understand that all those programs can only process 2D information so all will result more or less in plateau-like shapes.