Resize normals?
Hi all,
Sorry for the newie question, but is it possible? I have some models with very huge 8k and 4k normals.dds textures and I want resize them to 1k to improve performance. To resize I use paint.net or gimp and with albedo and composite textures works fine, but with normals something happends to the texture that creates shadows in the final model. What am I missing? Do I need another tool to do that?
Replies
what's probably happening is that the texture is being run through some sort of color space transform - this is common with photo editing software (including photoshop)
i'm not sure you'll be able to do anything about it in paint.net but in gimp you should be able to turn off color management.
that's a bit of a funny looking normal map too - it looks like the blue channel is 0.5 all over rather than 1 which would cause some issues when used traditionally.
what's the target renderer and do you have an example of a normal map that was built for it?
that's a bit of a funny looking normal map too
looks like a object space map and not a typical tangent space map
those "shadows" would be normals facing backwards possibly so somethings gone out of range ? I'm not sure how resizing would cause that 😕
Upload both your source models and texture maps so that people can actually have a look instead of guessing.
Hi all,
Thanks for the replies. I shared some example textures:
This is the albedo that contain the main texture:
This the composite that gives reflection:
And this the normal for relief:
This is how looks the normal in GIMP:
If i resize the textures to 1024 for example, the albedo and composite works well in the game, but the normal breaks, showing those dark areas like the picture with yellow circles. And not only resize. If I paint a simple dot and save the texture normal, it shows with the same problem.
I see these are .DDS files; are you making sure to save in the correct DDS codec? I know from doing some modding work for Skyrim that there are about a million options for DDS, and choosing the wrong one can do some very weird things to the textures.
This is about using DDS for Skyrim modding, but should also apply to other programs:
Not sure if this is the problem, but could be!
Yes! That was the problem, the DDS compression type, that gray style is BC5 (linear, signed). Thanks to the preview view in Paint.net, exporting a .png to .dds, I've been able to found it easily, looking for a preview similiar to the original grey looking norm.dds. Also works with the R8G8 (Linear, Signed, V8U8) but it doubles the size.
Thanks to all, cheers :)