Generating Height Map

System

Im working on a Vertex Blending Material. Im using a diffuse from a bunch of bricks I made really fast in Zbrush, however Im drawing a blank in generating the Height Map.

Ive tried to make the map in xnormal and crazy bump, but the result is a really lame not even remotely detailed map. (See Attached)

What would the best way to generate a height map from a High Poly mesh in this situation?

Arcanox

Looking at your post history... are you a Max user?

Why don't you just generate a height map using RTT in max? I find that it usually gets me the best results.

Ben Apuna

It's really just like baking a normal map. In order to get good results from your high poly mesh, depth needs to be modeled at an angle. The sides of your bricks are modeled too straight.

Even so you should be getting some depth from the tops of you bricks baking in xNormal. Have you set the Height map baking option to Auto-normalize height rather than Manual normalization?

See these images and articles from the wiki:



http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29



http://wiki.polycount.com/3DTutorials/Modeling%20High-Low%20Poly%20Models%20for%20Next%20Gen%20Games?highlight=%28\bCategoryBumpMap\b%29

Arcanox

^^ The reason why I suggested Max and it's render to texture function is that you can set the minimum and maximum clip for your heightmap. You can avoid picking up a lot of those steep drops for the most part and you get the pieces you want.

I also sometimes just scale the model on the up axis to get a larger range of values in the heightmap. It picks out the angles a little more nicely and you get that nice bright white to black that you want out of your heightmap.

System

Thanks guys, Ive used a hack and just added an occlusion map back into the height map. It managed to capture the details and looks fine. Thanks!

bugo

well, i dont think you want to do that, but I find xnormal to be the best way of capturing depth maps.