that being said, say you have a sculpted highpoly naked body, bake a normalmap and convert that back to a heightmap it will surely not give you the same result as a heightmap baked from the highpoly.
normalmaps have no information about distances to the original surface, they just have directional information, which pixel is looking into which direction
normalmaps have no information about distances to the original surface, they just have directional information, which pixel is looking into which direction
it's kind of the reverse of height map to normal..... from a direction you can deduce a plane and all the surrounding pixels will be on that plane ie if a normal points 45 deg to the right the pixel to the left will be above (in height) and the pixel to the right below (in height) and the pixel above and below will be on the same level, repeat for all pixels and comute the height based on these relative positions. You can't compute exact values but you can resolve the form and apply a scaling factor.
I saw this first in Stannum blog/ .. be warned.. pure C -porgamm.. Since i saw that you also use blender... you might want to have a look at this blender addon here:
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it's kind of the reverse of height map to normal..... from a direction you can deduce a plane and all the surrounding pixels will be on that plane ie if a normal points 45 deg to the right the pixel to the left will be above (in height) and the pixel to the right below (in height) and the pixel above and below will be on the same level, repeat for all pixels and comute the height based on these relative positions. You can't compute exact values but you can resolve the form and apply a scaling factor.
Since i saw that you also use blender... you might want to have a look at this blender addon here:
github: HugoTini/NormalHeight.. don't know about it's quality..