Desiging Normal Maps

[UglyEd]

Hallo.

 

I always thought about creating normal maps. So I found this way:

 

I load the image for witch I wat to create a normal map as background image into corel draw. Then I draw edges of the ornaments of the image as objects within another new layer. Refering to the height of these ornaments I fill these objects with appropriate shades of grey. Then I export this layer as a tga-image.

I took took the liberty to make a normal map for the manwall01-texture.

 

 

Here is the result as 1024x1024 .tga

 

I made a new example:

 

 

The tile as .tga

 

 

The step between as .tga

 

 

The normal map as .tga

 

It's quickly made for simpe structures. And for more complex ones, you can decide how far you will go with the details.

Edited May 28, 2005 by UglyEd

[BlackThief]

Just tested the wall-texture with your normalmap ingame - turned out pretty good

I never worked with Corel Draw, so I couldn't really follow every step, but I'm quite surprised, that it works, because how does the normalmap plugin know, which part is lower and which is higher, when you just paint the outlines in another color?

Could you please post your heightmap of the wall-texture?

 

 

That's the way my heightmaps normally look:

 

(texture)

[Fingernail]

Apparently, according to the D3 wiki (links at doom3world.org), diffusemaps should be slightly darker than usual (normal textures) because no surface gives off as much light as they recieve... remember diffuse is LOCAL COLOUR, ie. what colour the surface is, shouldn't be shaded etc.

 

I'm not sure what to think, really. I mean, photo-sourced diffuses look fine as long as you get rid of the really big or dark shadows, but in theory they should just be like:

 

brick = red colour diffuse map, with cream/brown mortar in between.

grey rock = plain grey diffuse etc, maybe with patches of moss colour. Really undetailed.

 

The rest of the detail should be in the normalmap, all the creases and contours that you would, in more primitive engines, paint into a single texture.

[UglyEd]

@BlackThief

I assume, you like to include the fine ornaments of the tile into the normalmap.

 

The step from my greyscale image to the normal map I've done with Gimp and the normalmap plugin. In detail it's a conversion of a heightmap to a normalmap: dark areas are low and light areas are high. That's it.

[Springheel]

I wouldn't include the designs in the wood tile or the foor tiles. They would be fairly smooth, IMO.

[BlackThief]

@BlackThief

I assume, you like to include the fine ornaments of the tile into the normalmap.

no, I just wanted to show, how I'm doing the heightmaps.

 

The step from my greyscale image to the normal map I've done with Gimp and the normalmap plugin. In detail it's a conversion of a heightmap to a normalmap: dark areas are low and light areas are high. That's it.

 

so it's actually pretty much the same thing as I do.

[UglyEd]

The reason I use Corel Draw (vector manipulation) than a paint program (pixel / bitmap manipulation) is, that I have more possibilities concerning the manipulation of the objects (rotating mirroring, etc).

 

For example the is a tile that looks symetrical, but not 100%, I first design the first half, mirror it and adjust the few last inaccurate points.

 

It's also possible to create some "synthetic" textures:

 

 

 

Pyra_s as .tga

 

 

The step between (heigtmap)

 

 

Pyra_n as .tga

 

That looks:

 

 

Here is a screenshot from Corel Draw while I was wokring on the tiles (see my first post). The thin dark lines are the edges of the gray areas.

 

Edited May 28, 2005 by UglyEd

[UglyEd]

Btw: another use of the "Corel-Draw-Method": tombstones and other carved writings.

 

The marble:

 

The writing:

 

The normalmap:

 

The results:

 

And here the .TGAs:

 

The marble

 

The normalmap