normal map to highpoly?

Japhir

Hey guys, is there a way to make a highpoly object out of a normal map?

why i would want that:
-make a nice picture (of rocks or something like that)
-make a normal map out of it (using crazybump or NVIDIA filter)
-make a highpoly model out of the normal map (maybe just a highpoly plane that is deformed to fit the "height" of the normal map.)
-build a lowpoly to fit the highpoly
-and your done .

so is that possible?
thanks in advance!

MoP

Well, if you're using crazybump or nvidia filter then you can probably get a heightmap out of your source image.
Then you can just deform a subdivided plane (using a Displace modifier in Max) or the heightmap in some way (eg. load it as a mask in zbrush).
Then you have your highpoly mesh, and can optimize/retopologise from there.

You basically just described the workflow yourself... yes, it's possible, although I'm not sure why you'd want to do it.

Bal

I'm pretty sure you can bake any kind of map onto a model with Mudbox, used to do it at work all the time with hand painted height maps at my last job, but I think you can use normal maps too.
Must also be a way to do it in Zbrush as MoP said.

Japhir

thanks guys! lol, i didn't know max had a Displace modifier . works ok, but not as good as i had hoped.

Sage

Japhir what you are trying to do is more or less how displacements maps were used before you could sculpt with zbrush or mudbox. The problem with displacement maps is that it pretty much goes straight up so it's really hard to create nice angles and bevels. Maybe one day software dev will actually let you use parallax mapping to deform models. I would use crazybump to generate the height then bring that into a sculpting app and use the height to create a base to start from, and them modify it from there. More or less what Mop said. For Max to use the displacement map it will need a crap load of polys and it's not ideal to go in and refine this, unless you have a crap load of ram and pretty hefty processor that is. And even then it might be pretty hard to further develop the model.

Alex

you can use the displace approximation(wsm one) since that sometimes gives better results that displace. You just put your map in the material editor where it says displacement. Then turn on custom setting find the advance settings and turn on delauny. Uset the most tris and gives the best result and prepare for system slow down.