Xnormal how to increase small detail?

NAIMA

Is it possible to increase the small detail normal maps without touching the larger detail? I woudl do an overlay in PS but that would enhance the large detail stuff ... for some reason the small detail come out very subdle in the baking while instead arent like so in zbrush ...

EarthQuake

Can we see the highpoly and the resulting bake?

Generally, this is a content related thing, not a technical thing(like what bake settings to use) knowing how well your highpoly detail is going to translate down in the bake is very important. You should do preliminary test bakes, and then go back and edit your highpoly if you don't like the results.

NAIMA

Thats the model

and for small detail I mean mostly the noise bumps on the whole model of the hilt ....

pior

Make them "bumpier" in the first place ?

NAIMA

Lol well yeh but i saved the file after lot if work , apart from the bump and didnt want to redo all ... Tough inxnormalcavity seems the bumps get highlighted well ...

EarthQuake

Personally I like to do fine detail like this in 2d, after you've sculpted in 3d like this it can be really painstaking to edit and rebake. With 2d making changes is a less of a hassle.

Hell you can even paint your 2d source in 3d too.

In general it really helps to be aware of the scale, distance your object will be viewed at and texture resolution, and then add detail accordingly no matter how you're creating it.

Ace-Angel

You should have use layers to your advantage, but you didn't so now you suffer the fallout, muahah.

Seriously dude, just lasso around the area of the hilt in PS or GIMP or whatever 2D editing program you have and play around with the RG channels.

I don't know if Skyrim has Normal strength modifiers, but if it does, you could do it more procedurally.

But ask yourself this, do you really need it to be noisy in the first place? Just because big AAA studios like putting noise in their assets to make it look HD, doesn't mean it looks good.

Macattackk

load normal map into crazybump and mess with the finer detail sliders

EarthQuake

Well, you can adjust the *contrast* of the details, but thats not going to make them *read* any better. The problem here is that the details were created too small/fine, so when you bake it to a texture, or view it from a distance they don't really show up. Adjusting the contrast isn't really going to help.

Adjusting the contrast of the normal map is also likely to introduce other artifacts, like smoothing errors(or make smoothing errors worse).