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2D All the way! / Making normal maps with The Gimp?

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19
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Joined: 30th Dec 2005
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Posted: 9th Feb 2007 17:03
Does anyone have any good ideas on how to turn maybe a greyscale bumpmap into a normal map? Or is there any free application that one can use to generate normal maps between a low-poly model and a high-poly model? thx

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19
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Posted: 11th Feb 2007 01:27 Edited at: 11th Feb 2007 01:35
Yay, I got a plugin

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/normalmap/

I generated this normal map with it

yes Cash Curtis that is your shield. muahaha!

Why do I see some people put "null" before their linkies? o.O

aticper
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Posted: 11th Feb 2007 06:02
that looks really useful...

I wonder if I could convert my charactor textures into normal maps...

I'm not paranoid. Stop thinking that I'm paranoid!
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19
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Posted: 11th Feb 2007 19:24
/me has idea

maybe you can also use a different texture to get a normal map that adds detail that is different from the texture on your models.

/me is genius

Van B
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Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 12th Feb 2007 10:33
Looks like it does a decent job, but really converting from a greyscale image is not the ideal way to work, in fact it's pretty much bumpmapping rather than normal mapping.

Pro normal maps are made from high detail object geometry, which is projected onto the low poly model, and a normal map to match the texture is created, won't look much like the texture itself, but the results are just incredible. I mean, normal maps are designed to be like 3D height maps, most greyscale to normal converters just work out the 3 angles from the height map and apply them to the RGB. It is possible to have really sharp edges with normal maps, although not when converted from heightmaps.

It takes quite a bit of expensive software to do this, and you need to be able to come up with the media, but it's the way to get things looking like they should. I'm actually thinking about making a DBPro variant of this technique for my next project, like get your low and high detail models, stick them in the same place, and work out the high poly detail for each texture coord and apply it to a normal map. If I could get that working, then I'd release it to the community.

''Stick that in your text and scroll it!.''
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Posted: 12th Feb 2007 23:49
It doesn't necessarily need a heightmap to generate the normalmap, just the regular texture. With this ability, people like myself who can't model high-detail objects for crap, this is a great tool to generate extra detail; moreso if you use a different image to generate it off of

It is also teh free I would get ZBrush, if I could figure it out worth a crap, and if my budget (like $0) would allow it. It does seem like a very good modelling app, not as expensive as Max (afaik) or Maya, and it can do cool stufs. Although I can't do anything serious with the demo because I am utterly lost

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