Help with normal maps

[Daedalusxxx]

Hi.

 

I made a mod that increases the size and sharpness of the armor textures. Now I would like to make the normal maps for them. How should I go about doing this? I can make a normal map, but should I make a new one from the textures or just blow up the vanilla normal to match the size? Or should I combine them? Any help or thoughts are appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[Kaburan]

If you bumped up from say a 512 to 1024, or 1024 to 2048, you're probably going to want to make new normals out of the diffuse texture. However, since 1) you don't have a model to bake normals, you'll have to rely on hand painted normals.

 

I say just try rescaling it and sharpening, try to match exact quality of normals.

 

If that simply doesn't work out, I would suggest rescaling the pre-existing normal map, save a copy, sharpen the base, desaturate the copy, process that through Nvidia normal map plugin, set it to Overlay, play with those settings.

 

Try doing a gaussian blur +3 on a bottom layer, and then make several copies and process them through nvidia to achieve optimal results.

 

Ultimately you want normals exactly like the original.

[vashts1985]

i hear that xnormal is a great program for making normal maps from diffuse.

[Daedalusxxx]

I tend to use the following process when making new normals:

 

1. Desaturate a copy of the blown up texutre

2. Run it through Nvidia normal map plugin with the settings:

- Wrap checked

- Filter Type 5x5 for this leather texture (3x3 works well too)

- Scale 5 (just want a subtle effect)

- height source average RGB

- Aplha field Unchanged

 

And I end up with a normal map looking like this.

 

 

 

It's scaled down so it looks a bit crappy.

 

Then I can overlay it with the enlarged and sharpened vanilla normal. I tried using just this normal map instead of overlaying with the vanilla and it looks good ingame. Is the vanilla normal really necessary? I know its baked but I really couldn't see any difference ingame.

 

Any thoughts?

 

EDIT: Whoops, I noticed invertY is not supposed to be checked (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Stilll, the normal looks almost identical ingame, just with the surfaces raised that are supposed to be.

[Daedalusxxx]

And this is what it looks like ingame.

 

 

 

Again, it's not saved with full jpg quality so this pic doesn't really do it justice.

 

I copied the specular map from the vanilla and resized and sharpened it to match my normal map.

 

EDIT: new screenshot with corrected normal

[Daedalusxxx]

Thanks for all the answers. Thanks especially to Kaburan for the excellent info, I tried that and it's looking extremely good.