Thread 1019553

How would I go with painting my own normal map from scratch? Experimenting with a better workflow than the traditional baking here.

>>1019553 (OP)
>better workflow than the traditional baking
Why are you reinventing the wheel? To answer your question use substance designer

>>1019553 (OP)
Bake a sphere that you can then use as a color picker. Going lower poly will help you reliably pick colors. Some programs offer such pickers out of the box

>>1019557
Nice idea, I think instead of lowpoly you can also try to quantize the colors.

>>1019554
fuck off from the thread dickmunching faggot

If you work on normal maps in sRGB it's going the get messed up.

>>1019553 (OP)
Look at a normal map of a object with easily recognizable up/down left/right in the green and the red channel. You can hand paint great looking normals by hand by painting a pair of grayscale images with a gradient in the correct direction of shading. Download filters for Photosop like xNormal or the Nvidia normalmap filter and you can normalize the result of that to generate a matching blue channel.

>>1019554
Hand painted normals has a lot of utility and is a powerful technique once you get the hang of it.
Perhaps you are trying to add deep normals to a existing photo texture of something, or you're otherwise
adding normals to something that inherently has no geometry, like a 2D painting etc.

There are many valid reasons why you may would wanna generate a normal map without having to bake anything.

Pic related is another way of doing it, paint in your curvature as a mask and then sample colors from a normal sphere and replace the correct looking colors at the corresponding angles.

>>1019569
For reference this is what that model looks with and without hand-painted normals.

>>1019570
To create the mask you just make a selection where you wanna drop down shading and create the gradient with a proper size soft brush the side similar to how you paint shading with an airbrush.

>>1019570
Which leg is the good leg?

normalfags

>>1019564
Quantize will be somewhat random about it, low poly mean you can deliberately choose what sort of angles are important to you

>>1019553 (OP)
You could try drawing it in black+white then converting it into a normal map with laighter. I haven't done that, admittedly (or maybe I did and forgot), but it's worked well for when I wanted to convert image textures into normal maps so I don't see how it'd fail to do the same with a black and white image.

>>1019596
> You could try drawing it in black+white then converting it into a normal map with laighter
That's a bump map, it can't express a full spectrum of what a normal map can. It doesn't have reflection "angles" basically, it only has height. You can convert any bump map to a normal map, but you can't convert any normal map to bump map without losing information.
>>1019589
Trvke.

>>1019604
>That's a bump map
I know? That's why I suggested converting it into a normal map with Laighter.

>>1019658
Not really "converting" because that's impossible, at best it can "generate" a normal map from bump map, and in terms of angles I think it's gonna be the same as baking normal map from geometry? Which kinda defeats the purpose, because custom angles is what people want handpainted normal map for, and here you skip this step altogether and let automation pick the angles according to some hidden prebuilt algorithm.

>/3/ mental gymnastics and extra manual labor just to circumvent the standard efficient and quickest industry standard method
this entire is retarded and populated by hairy noskill ngmi lowpoly retro trannies

>>1019668
Handpainted normal maps have been a thing in the industry since Halo 2

>>1019668
> lowpoly retro trannies
Normal maps were never used in old lowpoly games, and they are extremely rarely used in new lowpoly games, and when they are, those are the crazy hybrid styles you won't ever confuse with anything old.

>>1019668
True
>>1019671
What industry? Ain't nobody paying for hand painted normals, might as well light your money on fire.

>>1019684
the game industry, chud. stop shitting up threads.

>>1019553 (OP)
You can make a height map and use gimp's filters to convert it to a normal map, ive done that once or twice

>>1019715
HAHAHAHAHAHAHSHSHHAHAHAHS

I've seen like two blender addons that let you paint normals on the mesh itself

>>1019733
Blender cultists and their constant dependencies on addons

>>1019787
Blender addons are completely busted, though? Imagine trying to retopologize in base Blender when Softwrap exists lmao.

>>1019789
>Imagine trying to retopologize in base Blender
I still retopo in default blender, but I only need to retopo manually once every two months on average
I would probably get retopoflow or something if I needed to do it daily

>Softwrap
That looks trippy and I don't like that they're charging 40 bucks for a better shrinkwrap and a grab brush

>>1019789
>>1019790
Yes goy, pay 60€ per addon for every basic feature that you need for it to work properly

>>1019791
i can go onto github or the built-in addon browser and get my features for free

>>1019557
Damn thats a good idea
Ive been messing with some 2.5D, this comes in handy, thx

>>1019553 (OP)
>painting my own normal map from scratch
>better workflow than the traditional baking
lmao no
Here's what you actually meant to say:
>I can't sculpt and I can't model, so instead of learning I'll try to reinvent the wheel and do retarded shit