Well, yes, I guess, but it'd be a bit tricky for anything that wasn't totally flat. For example if you want to make a 5-sided cylinder appear more organic and smooth, you'd have to know the difference in normal angle and paint accordingly ... I guess you could do it by trial and error but it'd take ages. Basically just…
Direction of the normals is a good point and seems like it would pose the biggest hurdle. The nvidia PS filter is originally what had me thinking of this, as if you could hand paint a height map and go from there.
I'm still learning but what I did is output a normal map from Max using a lowpoly and meshsmoothed version of my character and combined this with a displacement map I painted for the same character by using the Nvidia plugin and layering it over the other in PS as an overlay
Yea I'd love to have some sort of a 3D input device that could be used to paint in normal information directly onto the model in real time, like a 3D wacom tablet or ZBrush without the poly geometry. Maybe the new Nintendo controller will lead to these sorts of tools being developed?
j4polaris: That's most likely because your layered UV's were made from a mirrored copy of the mesh? Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of whether you're…
mostly working for "simple" details, you can convert bumpmaps (heightmaps) to normalmaps. many renderers also let you render a "scene" to normalmap, that way you could "model" some sort of detail and render it to a normalmap... easiest I guess would be painting heightmaps...…
[ QUOTE ] j4polaris: That's most likely because your layered UV's were made from a mirrored copy of the mesh? Most game engines have coding to compensate for mirrored UV's, but if you're just looking at the normal-map in 3dsmax or some viewer that doesn't support mirrored UV's, then it's gonna look wrong regardless of…