Normal maps.
Hey, new here 
. I am having a problem with a normal map, well, more of a question regarding them. My problem is a did a low poly model in max, imported into zbrush sculpted dings, scratches, and a few other details. Then I imported it all back into max, and did a Projection modifier and a Render To Texture to get a normal map.
I then made a texture for it, the problem is I have a wooden handle on the model I just used a wood texture, but I did not sculpt the wood grain in zbrush.
I was wondering is there a way, that is I took the diffuse texture I made, and make a normal map from it (getting the wood grain, and metal scratches from it) can I somehow merge it to work with the Render to texture normals map? Or somehow.. combine them together?
Thanks for any help
Diffuse texture ( What I need the wood grain normal map from.)
Original Normal map.
Render of original normal working, but no wood grain ( what I need ).
Hopefully this was understandable, and someone can help me , thankyou
. I am having a problem with a normal map, well, more of a question regarding them. My problem is a did a low poly model in max, imported into zbrush sculpted dings, scratches, and a few other details. Then I imported it all back into max, and did a Projection modifier and a Render To Texture to get a normal map.I then made a texture for it, the problem is I have a wooden handle on the model I just used a wood texture, but I did not sculpt the wood grain in zbrush.
I was wondering is there a way, that is I took the diffuse texture I made, and make a normal map from it (getting the wood grain, and metal scratches from it) can I somehow merge it to work with the Render to texture normals map? Or somehow.. combine them together?
Thanks for any help
Diffuse texture ( What I need the wood grain normal map from.)
Original Normal map.
Render of original normal working, but no wood grain ( what I need ).
Hopefully this was understandable, and someone can help me , thankyou
Replies
Nvidia Normal Map Filter - Its a photoshop filter that changes an image into a normal map.
xNormal - This is a standalone app for baking normal maps. It also includes a height to normals filter which is pretty much the same as the nVidia photoshop filter.
nDO normal creation toolkit - Yet another photoshop tool. I have to admit Ive never used it, so I can't go into specifics...but looking at the tutorial page made me download it.
CrazyBump - This is a standalone app that converts photos to normal maps. This tool gives you some good control over some aspects of the conversion (There are sliders to adjust the strength of large, medium, very fine detail...etc..) This tool is not free, though. There is a trial..and its 99 bucks for a non-commercial license and 299 for a commercial one. Try it out though, I like it.
There may be other tools but those are the ones that I know of.
As for combining this with your bake, you can take the layer(or layers) from the generated normal map, and overlay it onto your baked normals (with the overlay layer style).
When you do that, make sure that you go into your blend options for the overlayed layer (its where you can add bevel and emboss, drop shadow..etc..) and turn off the blue channel. You want to do that otherwise your going to be adding blue to all the other, non blue sections of your bake, and it will be less accurate.
From there you can modify layer opacity, or paint out details you dont want...etc....
Shadermap
The free version works quite good, altough there is no UI in the free version.
But yea, not to pitch a sale or anything, but you might wanna get shadermap pro current version just in case you don't like coming changes/prefer the way it is now/ will be able to use both and technically have 2 programs for the price of 1/16th crazy bump. :P
More directly to OP's needs with the thread:
When you generate a diffuse based normal map, there are a few things to do that will make it much much better, as the normal maps produced will never be perfect from 2d hax (well, they can be perfect if you generate from deliberately painted gray-scale, but in this case, you'll need to tweak it).
After you make a normal map in a generator like that (also, do it with a version of your diffuse that doesn't have your AO in it already!), open it in photoshop or whatever you use that lets you get to the channels
Go one at a time, starting with blue, then going up to green, then red, and do levels on all of them.
Blue channel is depth, and with generated normals (and sometimes even hp geo baked normals) this is severely lacking.
So if photoshop, select the blue channel, ctrl+l for levels, and bring up the black slider to at least meet where it all starts, then you can tweak them. If it's too dark, it will mess up your normal map, so be careful here, but also don't be afraid to go with somethat that looks "too much" - test it in a game engine to decide, rather than 100% go by the look of the RGB together.
You'll start to see how much is too much, how much too much is still okay, and how much you can add to blue, while you can usually level R and G a lot less, you can still manipulate them more than you'd think to increase the quality of your diffuse generated normals.
If you ever find that you can't level something without "messing it up" and making it all blown out or wrong colors, you can renormalize the effects.
Treat this like the "last step" to tuning up your normals in your material, or the last step on any normal layer before it is blended, and after they all blend. It is required all the time, but for example, this diffuse blending you'll want to do will probably benefit greatly from bringing out some blues.
I'll post an exampe.
I just wanted to comment on the normal map you are showing in your OP.
Your original normal map bake looks like you baked it with your low poly edges set to 'Hard.'
Make sure when you bake you bake with smoothing group 1 (all edges smooth) which will give you a cleaner map.
The main thing for your topic at hand is to always, when generating diffuse-based normal maps with filters, is to go light, and adjust after. This way you don't have to rely on the hacks that these generators are so much, you can get your base from them, then decide which channels need what.
You're not limited here either, you can take this so much further, this is just a fast poop to show you what is possible. I broke some gradients in the blue channel for example.
Here's my update, just need to work on the spec map now.
Thankyou again everyone, and thankyou for posting the helpful links, and programs. =]
.. I really hate unwrapping.
Also a note on what Mortal Human is describing, Never EVER do this on a normal map extracted from a bake. You'll break the counter shading.
I cant comment on doing it to maps derived from diffuse textures but I'd be cautious of doing it as your hand editing a non human readable map.
Are you renormalizing after? That seems like an important step to keep in that you've omitted.
I'm also not sure why you're blowing it out by hand instead of just cranking up the values in whatever you used to generate that normal to begin with?
whats the point of doing this at all? Im not saying its without merit Its just something I've always seen as one of those things folks used to do before they knew better. Like using the blue channel for AO
should allow you to quickly rough up the edges of things and if you want to put some damage on a flater area you will need to push it in a bit with a standard and claytubes brush and than rough it up with the trim dynamic and mallet fast.
considering your working on metal the hpolish also can be good to clean things up after and flatten out some surfaces.
also i would never recommend leveling the channles of a baked normal map like that, it will just mess things right up.
even for high frequency normals im using for extra detail i would just leave alone in the texture map and multiply the Red and Greed by a constant in the material shader to upscale or tone it down, that way it isnt destructive and can be tweaked in game.
you could also make a alpha out the the design your using and try using the alpha with the layer brush to get the design in.
im not a expert with zbrush so someone else might pipe up with a better way.
also you should consider how it looks zoomed out and how much detail your normal map can take?
you dont want to be zoomed in worrying about blocky faces upclose when the detail is too small to for your limited amount of pixels in your normal and diffuse maps to represent.
Also, thankyou Passerby for the helpful insight on the majority of my problems I have been posting, I really appreciate the help, and have learnd helpful tips , and tricks that I had never heard of before.
a few work arounds could be to smooth the area first, to use the relax deformer.
or the more involved workaround could be to do a "remesh all" followed by some project alls between the old tool and the new one generated from the remesh.
when you do a remesh it try to even the quads out as much as possible.
and a other solution could be to go back into the base mesh and add more edge loops to make the topology into even quads, which overall is prolly the best solution but you would still need to project the detail from thee sculpt to the new base mesh or redo the sculpt.
hope this helps and good luck.
This is my model I am importing into ZB, then after adding 7 layers of subdivides, is the topology wrong, or is something weird just going on here?
Yea, that's a given after you edit a normal map in most cases, to renormalize it. Good for pointing it out though, just in case.
I'm doing it by hand because you have greater control and edits aren't global, they are per channel that way. You can do a lot in the channels of a normal map.
Share me some better ways, I'd love to hear them :P I just do it do make the contrast higher in the channels and result in that deep baked look, if there are better ways to do that, remove the unused range, especially with diffuse generated normals, I'm all ears, awesome.
You see those wide rectangles up there on your mesh? those might be causing you trouble, try to make them more, square.
why are you concerned about unused range. its a map of unit vectors, not a pretty picture. The blue is usually pretty bereft of detail.
Id like to see the differences in shading this makes, do you have any nice examples?
he thinks he belives his noramal maps need to scream "im a normal map" at the end user
You do not even have to renormalize unless you want to be completely sure... Because you aren't changing the colors of the image, you are just leveling the channels, just like you would level any other texture... if you blow some stuff too far out, you can fix it with the plugins anyway.
Mind blown? I did it ALL THE WAY on overdrive for this screen shot, to outline the differences. This rock isn't great in the first place - but you can clearly see the differences from simply leveling the textures, which could be much better than I have done here in an exaggerated example. Maybe I will make some more examples, but you guys should, you know, try it, and post yours, and your impressions of the technique once you tried it. I am not the first person to do this:
It's not something you will always do. But it can improve normals you are unhappy with quickly and easily, especially those based on diffuse-to-normal hacks like the nvidia tools or crazy bump.
Example has too much, without real man technique not enough? It's okay to do it with some sense and land in the middle with something more nice.
it's easier to play with the source image and decided what you want different elements of the image to do to the normals, than to just intensify whatever the normal generator gives you.
Especially if it's DXT5NM compressed - your blue channel gets wiped and gets re-constituted in the shader itself, which is normalized as part of that process.
Considerable dicking around with the post-bake normals is probably not a great habit to get into - especially if it's not easily replicable. Easiest solution all round is just set it up so your bake is how you want it in the first place
indeed. with programs like crazybump its pretty easy to get deep looking maps with dicking about with channels.
I tend to adjust the levels of the red and green channels a sometimes when I use the Nvidia filter.
I don't touch the blue though. As Talon said the blue channel gets wiped often. If your importing your normal map into UDK correctly, your blue channel gets wiped, for example.
And I don't usually burn and dodge...just do a little levels adjustment to tighten the spectrum.
I Don't ever do this on any normals that I get from baking though, just the ones from the Nvidia filter. It works well enough to pop some of the detail more if you aren't using something like crazybump.
Moderation is key though. It can look like butt if you go overboard.
I like powerful normal maps too, like how CoD4 had really powerful normal maps, but GTA IV for example has very weak normal maps that kinda don't even belong there/were batch generated/half of them are wrong/flipped, etc
and i seen some games that have too much depth in a material than there would be in real life, seen games that have wooden trim or doorframes with really big grooves for the wood grain when in real life the indent is so small you would only see it react to the light on very sharp angles.
blah long story short what im trying to get at is look at real life examples of the material your trying to create, pushing something too far looks just as fake as not having it there to begin with.
i do it all the time, i built my home office in my basement which is still partially unfinished so from time to time while working on stuff i will just get up and take a look at the ceiling supports, for a good wood reference, or at the wall for a good concrete reference, and than i got my desk against the chimney so i got a good brick reference right there.
it's always good to use references, photos will do but if you can see the real physical object that helps since you can see multiple angles and move the light around it to get a idea on spec and surface detail.