Well, yes, I guess, but it'd be a bit tricky for anything that wasn't totally flat.
For example if you want to make a 5-sided cylinder appear more organic and smooth, you'd have to know the difference in normal angle and paint accordingly ... I guess you could do it by trial and error but it'd take ages.
Basically just paint in each channel individually, using smooth gradients as a base, would probably work a bit. But it'd probably be fairly mind-bending.
mostly working for "simple" details, you can convert bumpmaps (heightmaps) to normalmaps.
many renderers also let you render a "scene" to normalmap, that way you could "model" some sort of detail and render it to a normalmap... easiest I guess would be painting heightmaps...
Direction of the normals is a good point and seems like it would pose the biggest hurdle. The nvidia PS filter is originally what had me thinking of this, as if you could hand paint a height map and go from there.
The normal map process is very un-art-like to me. It needs to be made a lot more non techy for guys like me. I imagine it will in time. Max 9 or 10 maybe?
j4polaris: That's most likely because your layered UV's were made from a mirrored copy of the mesh?
Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of whether you're painting them by hand or generating from high-res geometry.
I'm still learning but what I did is output a normal map from Max using a lowpoly and meshsmoothed version of my character and combined this with a displacement map I painted for the same character by using the Nvidia plugin and layering it over the other in PS as an overlay
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I thought part of being a videogame artist was combining being a techy person with being an arty person?
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I´ll agree with that
That is even the extra bit that makes it really interesting.
[/ QUOTE ]To a certain extent yes but normal mapping just feels like it needs better tools. Maybe it gets better when you get use to it, but for now it pulls me out of the zone faster than uvmapping.
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j4polaris: That's most likely because your layered UV's were made from a mirrored copy of the mesh?
Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of whether you're painting them by hand or generating from high-res geometry.
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Gotcha MoP. That's exactly why that was happening. Thanks!
Yea I'd love to have some sort of a 3D input device that could be used to paint in normal information directly onto the model in real time, like a 3D wacom tablet or ZBrush without the poly geometry. Maybe the new Nintendo controller will lead to these sorts of tools being developed?
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For example if you want to make a 5-sided cylinder appear more organic and smooth, you'd have to know the difference in normal angle and paint accordingly ... I guess you could do it by trial and error but it'd take ages.
Basically just paint in each channel individually, using smooth gradients as a base, would probably work a bit. But it'd probably be fairly mind-bending.
many renderers also let you render a "scene" to normalmap, that way you could "model" some sort of detail and render it to a normalmap... easiest I guess would be painting heightmaps...
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html
here is a normalmap filter from nvidia, which allows you to convert heightmaps to normalmaps
http://www.zarria.net/
I thought part of being a videogame artist was combining being a techy person with being an arty person?
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I´ll agree with that
That is even the extra bit that makes it really interesting.
Do you guys know if this happens if you have overlapping UV's and use a high-resolution model as the normal map?
Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of whether you're painting them by hand or generating from high-res geometry.
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I thought part of being a videogame artist was combining being a techy person with being an arty person?
[/ QUOTE ]
I´ll agree with that
That is even the extra bit that makes it really interesting.
[/ QUOTE ]To a certain extent yes but normal mapping just feels like it needs better tools. Maybe it gets better when you get use to it, but for now it pulls me out of the zone faster than uvmapping.
j4polaris: That's most likely because your layered UV's were made from a mirrored copy of the mesh?
Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of whether you're painting them by hand or generating from high-res geometry.
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Gotcha MoP. That's exactly why that was happening. Thanks!
Still polygons, but it's haptic!