Yep, but the maths I'm suggesting works and is much easier (you can do it in PS without scripts in sbout five seconds). If you start off with the normal vector xyz (.71, 0, .71) and you wanted to shorten it to 50% length, you'd divide the length by 2. You could also get the same result by 'blending' it 50% towards zero -…
hrmm, on that line of thought if I understand what you're saying you could use the AO map as a mask for the opacity of a 128,128,128 layer over the original normal map (the opacity would act as a % toward 0). It might work but I haven't tried it yet. edit: mixed up a number
This is somewhat more of a theoretical question, but as the title says, could a normal map be made with vector lengths from 0-1 according to the values of an AO map rather than having a separate AO texture? I think this would have the effect of multiplying a grayscale texture onto the object, but I'm not completely sure.…
From a theoretical view this is not a problem, but you have to deal with some issues. If possible you need to adjust the shaders to re-normalize the normal where needed or extract the ao value on its own. Most lighting calculations which use the normal in combination with a dot product, have no problem with the scaled…