How do you create normal maps for hand-painted textures?

Schrodinger's Backface · Oct 2013

Hey there, I've googled around and either this is hard to answer or I'm using all the wrong keywords.

How does one go about creating a normal map for a texture like this one? I've tried using nDo2, but I apparently know a lot less about that workflow than I thought. I just don't get how this artist made this normal map so clean/precise? I'm guessing it was a height to normal or something of the effect, but I definitely need some advice because I'm spinning wheels.

wirrexx · Oct 2013

i believe this is the work of jessica dinh. But not quit sure. she apparantly did this by hand using this

wirrexx · Oct 2013

[ame="

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTnaPhONOA"]Hand-painted Normal Map - YouTube[/ame] there you go matey

Schrodinger's Backface · Oct 2013

Seriously? What.A.Boss.

Well thanks! This probably answers my question, then.

Edit: Oh shiz, ty for the vid too!

fatihG_ · Oct 2013

Interesting method.

What I usually do myself though is just paint a custom heightmap, convert it to a normal map and manually edit the channels of the normal map.

That way all I gotta do is paint with black and white (gresyscale) and not worry about the fancy normal map rainbow colors.

timotronprime · Oct 2013

I would have thought it would have started as a sculpt, then hand-painted using the normals generated from the high-res sculpt as reference.

Would the results from method in the linked video be "accurate"? This seems to even take more time too.

Cremuss · Oct 2013

Woah. I don't know how fast the video is speed up but this should have taken ages to do. All the lasso selection she did...
I agree with bb0x, you better paint a black&white heightmap and use it to generate a normalmap. But I guess she did a great job at handpainting her normal map, the result looks good !

pior · Oct 2013

Handpainting normal directions like that takes no longer than regular painting - all you do is paint in light direction, there's nothing crazy about it !

Of course quickly sculpting the rocks would have worked too. Knowing how to do both is very valuable.

ZacD · Oct 2013

I still think painting a height map would be quicker and easier for some assets, but since she's mostly using 9 directions/colors, it wasn't too big of a deal for an asset like this.

Octo · Oct 2013

Make a heightmap and make a normalmap out of that with for example crazybump.
Or turn it into geometry using a displacement map and bake it however you want.

BARDLER · Oct 2013

You could do the Blizzard workflow and use real geometry as your base. Bake out a bunch of different mat caps, including a normal, and then use that base to create the hand painted style.

Schrodinger's Backface · Oct 2013

Nice, all of these are good suggestions. My first instinct is always to model and then bake, but I was just really sure that the art from my original post wasn't made through baking and I couldn't figure out how to do it.

I'm probably just gonna try every single method--haha

Thanks, everyone!

Eric Chadwick · Oct 2013

Some more tips here, I remember Joe sharing how they did it at 38 Studios
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1745478#post1745478

How do you create normal maps for hand-painted textures?

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