Hallucinations about Normal mapping

tremulant

Okay I'll make this as short as possible, cause I am really sick right now but...As I was laying in bed feeling miserable I started to think about normal mapping. >Lol...I know pathetic...anyway...

Why don't they make a program like zbrush where( instead of building a highpoly and using zmapper to creat a normal map for the low poly) You can actually just use the brush tool in the standard non textured mode on your low poly, and it simultaneously is editing a normal map that you can see as you work?...The model wouldnt be blue and green , you would actually have a WYSIWYG effect where it shows you exactly what the low poly will look like.

If this already exist, just tell me im dumb...aigh, gonna go lay down now and drink some 7up...Beaaaaaahhh

vahl

I'm pretty sure you can paint your bump and see the result in realtime in modo, though I may be wrong, maybe the modo pros can confirm that fact

arshlevon

i know you can paint bump maps in bodypaint, i know body paint supports normal maps, but i have never tried painting one.

Guriamo

you can actually paint normal maps directly onto the model in modo ...

Ruz

but it's just as easy painting in zbrush as it is painting a bump map, so why bother?

Kevin Albers

Sounds like displacement painting in Silo 2. In any case, it's a fine sort of workflow. It's nice to see software tools get better and better over time.

EarthQuake

The reason this isnt really done is pretty simple. If you're simply painting a bump map like that you dont get the difference between the highres and low res, so no compensation for the smoothing. So what you would end up is a low poly model with vertex shading and a hand painted bump on top of it. Which in general looks pretty crappy compared to modeling out a highres and baking it down. Now if you were to model out a medium res mesh and and then just paint overlaying details on top of that you might be able to get some decent results. I've yet to find something that can do that and dosent suck ass(modo's paint tools are pretty ass compared to just painting in PS or something) so its generally much easier just to model the highres.

If someone has a workflow for this that is actually worth using i would be very interested to hear about it.

tremulant

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Now if you were to model out a medium res mesh and and then just paint overlaying details on top of that you might be able to get some decent results.

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That's what I was invinsioning. I just think it would be nice to see exactly what is going to get transfered down to the low poly in realtime, without having to bake it down...kinda like skipping the middle man.

Or to the point where you could do the basic zbrush highpoly workflow, then once you get to a good point with your large proportion modifications...Bake it down to the low poly, and begin the normal map editing by way of brush on your modded low poly like i was talking about. Like a normal paint mode, you could toggle on and off. Maybe even as a layer.

Ruz

But surely as we get more and more high res, photos wil provide the micro detail and you hand paint in zbrush, mudbox etc the major forms.
its all about ease of use in the pipeline and ...
personally I miss painting texctures by hand as it seemed like 'art', but this next gen stuff seems a bit painful antimes.
only a programmer could come up with blue/red green relief maps as an expresion of art

oXYnary

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If someone has a workflow for this that is actually worth using i would be very interested to hear about it.

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Well, you wont like it, but zbrush has a bumpmap shader so you can in fact paint bumpmaps in zbrush and using the zprojection tool burn it into the normal map output.

Something that mudbox cannot since it has no painting tools.

EarthQuake

You can paint on your low poly mesh, but you cannot apply a normal map, have it rendered in realtime and paint of top of that. I actually dont mind using zbrush at all for painting details, its midlevel sculpting that i hate in it.

Eric Chadwick

Bodypaint does have that raymapping feature like arsh says, so you could probably bring in a med-res model and paint normals on it. Apparently it distorts the diffuse/specular/reflect lighting in realtime, according to your brush strokes. But... you can't rotate the model, takes some time to re-render the view each time. I dunno, all hearsay.