I'm primarily a UE4 user. I have been using Bitmap2Material 3 for quite a while. I think its quite a nice replacement for Crazybump which I don't use anymore. My biggest complaint about these normal map / height map creation software is that the heightmap never looks good. The normal map usually looks good from Bitmap2Material 3 and xNormal. What if I wanted to make a height map out of a brick texture that I have, what should I do to make a nice heightmap for it? Photoshop? How?
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There's a demo version you can try out. https://www.knaldtech.com/
And tbh, getting a good height map off a single photo image? The result has never been perfect. Unless you took the photo in a specific manner that you can extract the depth information from it easily. And without professional photography equipment and a lighting environment which would cost you 3000 times more than a software, it is impossible to create such photo, not to say for it to work correctly.
Note:
Model the bricks in 3D package in the best detail you can, then bake the height information onto something, like a texture plane. This way you will get a perfect height map if the model of the brick is modelled correctly.
I do have Substance Designer 4.5, I should learn it more, I haven't used it for months since I got it. I will check out how to make height maps in Substance Designer.
In that case, XNormal has nothing to do with it. XNormal is about baking from geometry, not generating from diffuse maps.
Just greyscale your diffuse in Photoshop and brighten/darken areas to make your height map.
I wrote this a very long time ago, but might help get the idea over... www.farfarer.com/temp/normalMapMiniTut.jpg
If you have application that deals with 16 or 32 bit depth image, you can easily add high-frequency detail on a height map.
It isn't a matter of adding detail to a heightmap. Of course you CAN add that detail to a heightmap, but in gamedev it is very bad practice to add that detail to a heightmap for most things other then terrain.
On non terrain stuff, normal maps are your high frequency detail and heightmaps for parallax mapping are your low frequency.
I'm talking about painting height map and bake them down onto 8 bit as an normal map. Using height map itself in game engine is not a good idea indeed unless for displacement and parallax, or for terrain.
Ok. So that is what I have stated all along. I'm going to excuse myself from this conversation.