I think I found out to replicate this behaviour in Substance Designer and how to bake the model information there. The first Attached image shows you the standard 8 bit normal map output on the mesh side by side with the normal map. Like Joe did it in his opening post, I increased the contrast of the normal maps to uncover…
How can I replicate this behaviour? I tried out several simple meshes in Maya but never got a result like that. Can you please share this arc-like mesh for us, EarthQuake? I would like to test a few things out. And because I think my questions got a bit lost, here is my post again: As mentioned by EarthQuake, 3ds Max…
just to chime in here, the last 3 clients i've worked with have requested 16-bit normals. i know two of those clients are using them in game that way, not sure about the third one. in any case, i think you'll start seeing this trend on all of the real big AAA shit as developers deal with the texture memory problem.
Krita doesn't dither by default. I recommend working with 16 bits integer at all times within Krita for normal maps and using your engine to do the conversion to 8-bit. That way, the color management doesn't mess with the normal data. If you need to add some dithering on top of your normal map to break up banding that…
Yeah, it happens automatically and if you don't have good source data to start from there is only so much you can do. Baking out larger and downsizing re-samples the image which gives PhotoShop a chance to dither it, but without good input you can't expect much. Also that's even more work than simply baking 16 bit in the…
If you're interested in technical details, here's a talk on something similar in Cryengine: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2010/Kaplanyan-CryEngine3%28SIGGRAPH%202010%20Advanced%20RealTime%20Rendering%20Course%29.pdf It also mentions storing 16 bit normal maps in 8bit 3dc through encoding improvements and the same…
Hmm i seem to run into an issue with loading the 16 bit TIF(baked in xNormal) into Photoshop CS5. The bake preview of xNormal shows a normal looking normal map(128,128,255 as average etc.) but when opened in Photoshop, i get the 'This document contains Adobe Photoshop data which appears to be damaged.' warning, and when…
Hi, so I have a question in regards to 32bit colour maps. My current workflow involves baking extremely high poly meshes (1-2 billion polys), and in order to save time loading the mesh into Xnormal, I bake all of my maps out at 32bit EXR. However, this results in a much brighter Colour map than I would get if I baked it at…
Nice post, Joe. It's great to get this written down for people. 16bits FTW! I just wanted to chime in real fast and note that the banding can appear on areas with low curvature in addition to the high curvature examples that Joe made above (though his examples are more than adequate). Mainly so people don't assume because…
This is a complicated subject but essentially there isn't any way that you can reduce 32bit float to 8bit without some kind of dithering unfortunately. The best you can probably do is to use hard edges around your UV islands so the normal map is less colourful so it compresses better (vs one smoothing group for everything)…