Tips for normal mapping?

[SonicXtreme]

Hey guys, I looked around abit , and decided to bring this up here to just to see what peoples tips for normal mapping are.

Atm I am only just starting out with em , so any tips, tricks or helpfull advice would be great atm, including stuff like stuff to avoid or dont do.

[Llama Juice]

Don't rely on Crazy Bump to do everything for you. :P

[PenGuin1362]

Keep in mind when baking a normal map, light is cast straight on to the object. So say if you have a cylinder to act as a nail in the high poly model, the bottom of the cylinder should taper outward so that, whatever you're using to bake, can see it has depth.

[legionaire45]

In a nutshell... (http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map?highlight=(normal))

[Phopojijo]

Don't rely on Crazy Bump to do everything for you. :PBut it *does* do some nice shit.

There are several methods you can use... first is using Crazy Bump of course... another is making them in Photoshop (either unassisted or with nVidia's package)... another is generating them based from higher-resolution geometry in Maya, Mudbox, or ZBrush (probably Max too)... another is (if you have a physical object that's mostly planar) controlling the light to assemble your pictures into a normal map (http://www.zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html).

So yeah, many ways.

[neuro]

depends on what kind of normalmapping you want to do.

if you want to make highpoly baked to lowpoly objects type of normalmaps, you're going to have to build a highpoly mesh, and a lowpoly mesh to start with.
since i'm just going to assume this isn't what you're after, i'll assume you're looking for stuff like level textures, like ground and cliffs and such.

you can do it in many ways, most involve starting with a basic image of what you want.

then you can model a rough highpoly-ish base from that, which contains all the big shapes (like big rocks if youre going for a rocky ground thing) (make sure it all lines up with the diffuse image you've got) and then take the image into crazybump, and mix the two together a bit in photoshop.

the highpoly base will give you a good popping base, without all the distortion crazybump always puts into your output image.

if you're looking to add some smaller detail to that, you can just use separate images with stuff like cracks, and normalise those, and overlay those over (for example) your rocky surface you're using as base.

also, protip#1: make sure in the end you always renormalise your normalmap.
protip#2: if you overlay normalmaps, make sure you halve the bluechannel on whatever youre overlaying onto a base, so you don't 'break' the blue channel of the overall thing.

protip on what NOT to do: you can't simply copypaste pieces in a normalmap in photoshop and rotate them around, because it'll change the surface direction, and will give you VERY weird results.