Stuck with normal maps.

[Yoyi]

Hi all,

 

I am sort of stuck. I just retextured the blacksmith outfit (planing on doing most npc clothing). It looks just fine in nifskope, but when I get to the normal maps I just hit a brick wall. I have read everything I could find around here on the subject, I understand how they (sort of) work but when I try to apply it the nvidia tool just gives me the finger.

 

I tried making my texture BW then applying the filter but it barely does anything. I tried exaggerating and the blacks and whites and still barely noticeable differences in the map. Compared to the vanilla one it just looks flat. Another issue that I am having but this might have to do with the specular map inside the alpha channel is that everything is extremely dark bordering on black, all the nice detail I put on things like the leather apron just blend into an ugly black.

 

I am just trying to find a couple of quick steps for turning the BW texture into a simple normal map.

 

When I went to test this out the texture is nastily tiled on the character. I am not sure if this has something to do with mipmaps.

 

Also as I understand it it's fine saving textures themselves in dxt1 as long as there is no alpha on it so I could simply save the blacksmith texture as a dxt1 but the normal map should be dxt5, (there is 2 dxt5 options which also ads to the confusion dxt5 and dxt5 normal.)

Edited December 13, 2011 by Yoyi

[Ghogiel]

the vanilla normal map is created from a high poly model, not a height nap. ultimately the main reason is you will never be able to create as accurate enough height map to out do the vanilla one,

Try other tools for height to normal conversion, ndo, xnormal.

Edited December 13, 2011 by Ghogiel

[Yoyi]

the vanilla normal map is created from a high poly model, not a height nap. ultimately the main reason is you will never be able to create as accurate enough height map to out do the vanilla one,

Try other tools for height to normal conversion, ndo, xnormal.

 

I'll try those, most of the clothing normals are not really that detailed, so much of it is going to be just pretty simple stuff, cloth grain, some leather, etc. I hope I can fake it with one of those tools. Thanks for the reply!