What's the best way to get the normal/AO and Spec maps for a diffuse texture?

poopstick

Hi, I'm new here, and I'm really confused. I personally like to paint my textures in Photoshop as my background is illustration. I often get the diffuse to where I like but have absolutely no clue how to create normals, AO and specular maps from it?

From what I've seen in order to get normals you must make a high poly version in a program like Zbrush, but this seem extremely time consuming, plus diffucult to match your texture exactly. Am I missing something? Is there a much faster way to take your diffuse texture and start creating normals from it?

What's the industry standard for this sort of thing.

EarthQuake

Typically you model your highpoly first, then make your lowpoly/uvs, bake normal and ao maps, and then you create your diffuse and specular/metalness and gloss/roughness maps to match.

There days, with modern shaders, there isn't so much hand painting to be done. Most of material work is accomplished by defining base values for materials and blending in photo source where necessary. Baked in/painted lighting is something you want to avoid.

Unless of course you're doing very stylized work or mobile stuff, but in that case you're probably not using normal maps.

poopstick

It just seems so time consuming to make a high poly model in order to bake down on to your low poly, is there anything that allow you to paint a normal map? Almost as if you're painting in the depth onto a 2D normal map? I feel like I could achieve what I want much quicker that way.

EarthQuake

Yes and no. You can use something like nDo for creating normal map details in 2D: http://quixel.se/dev/ndo

However, a normal map isn't simply detail. Its a complex set of math that uses the normals from the high poly to replace the low poly's mesh normals. You'll never be able to paint a normal map to the same accuracy, which means its much more difficult to get correct shading on the low poly. This is especially problematic for hard surface work where accurate normal map information is essential, but even organics benefit from proper high resolution source.

Modeling high poly meshes is time consuming, yes, so start practicing. =D

sprunghunt

If painting a normal-map takes you less time than making a hi-poly you might want to look into speeding up your hi-poly modeling.