Hi, I'm making some custom textures for my map and I was wondering how you guys make bump maps? I used the nvidia tool now to make some bump maps. It came out pretty nice, but maybe I can make it better
Looks good man, although i'm not seeing the horizontal bumps on the multi-colored textures (if there are some)
I use the NVIDIA Photoshop Plugin - I usually get pretty nice results, but it can also depend on how the light hits the surfaces in your map. For instance, you'll probably see the bumpmaps better when light hits a surface at lower angle, moreso than when light is shining directly at a surface. Also, I find that for certain textures I have to invert the Y axis for certain things but most often I leave the Y axis as-is, and control the intensity of the bumping by changing the scale value - it really depends on what the texture is. You might want to make sure you didn't invert the Y if you didn't need to, at least for those green/yellow/blue/red textures, it kind of looks like you got the bumpmapping correct on that left-most texture in your screenshot. Here's an example of one of the textures I made. I use a Filter Type of 3x3, Average RGB for the Height Source, and a Scale of 8 (Alpha Field is set to Unchanged). I could use a higher Scale, sometimes I use around 12, and I think I once used 20, but I had it on 8 for a sandpebbles texture that was too bumped with any higher value, so I left it at 8 for this example. Texture: Correct Normal Map (Correct because the higher the value of the Green channel (Y axis), the more downward that area will be, so I want the cracks to appear coming upward from the normal map so that in-game they will appear to be inward and look like cracks.): Incorrect Normal Map (Incorrect because the lower the value of the Green channel (Y axis), the more upward that area will be, and I don't want the cracks to appear sticking outward in-game, they need to appear going inward in-game so that they look like cracks. However, looking at this normal map itself, it does represent what you want to see in-game, it's just the opposite of what the engine needs though.): Here's another example, from the Valve Developer Wiki: The cracks look raised in the normal map, but when in-game they will appear inward and the bricks will appear outward. See in-game result.
You bought crazybump then? When the creator started to sell the software, even all free older versions of crazybump suddenly only worked if i allowed them to update, which in turn made them not function without a paid code. Looking for less than legal copies on the internet resulted in virusses every time. So i started using the nvidia ps plugin myself.
You could start from the other direction - heightmapped 3d surface -> heightmap -> normal map -> albedo.
