normal map>diplacment

[APLevitz]

Probably not. Normal maps pretend there's that much extra geometry, and tell the light what direction it all faces -- not where to put it.

That said, if your normal map is in object space (not tangent), you might try desaturating it and see if it's at all close. Couldn't hurt.

(within that, you may want to convert the R G and B channels to seperate layers somehow, and composite 'em manually for greater control over how the info is merged -- don't just use Mode:Grayscale, as this will drop you down to 256 colors...)

edit:
Just remembered this nifty bookmark I've been meaning to investigate (http://66.70.170.53/Ryan/heightmap/heightmap.html). You can do that for me now. Post your results? :applause:

[lovisx]

the normal map is using colors to show the shape of the surface and intensity of color to show depth. You should be able to convert your normal map to grayscale and get simular results as the normal map.
When it is converted to grayscale the color info won't mean everything, because they will be converted to the gray value that equals the color value. So you will get a height map, bump map, displacement map, where the darker areas are deeper and the lighter areas are higher.

Or in other words I don't see why converting your normal map to grayscale wouldn't work for converting it to displacement map.

This said, I wasn't aware that changing something to grayscale makes it have less info then your usual displacement map. Aren't displacement maps only shades of grey and have no color info?

please clarify.

[stefan]

http://www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps8.html


On this site U wil find more infos. A lot of peoples are using NVIDIA Texture Tools. Photoshop plugin witch can create normal map from height map. There must be something else to do it back.

[donvlatko]

thanks people!
I will try with Photoshop as I see this solution is fast and it probably will give the results that I want...I will try with grayscale and see how it goes....Anyway Photoshope and plugins that Stefan said...I will also give a try.../

[BillSpradlin]

Couldn't you just extrapulate the displacement map from ZBrush instead of a normal map like you normally would? Maybe I'm just missing something, but instead of generating the normal map you could just generate a displacement out of zbrush, unless of course you have a prior normal map that you want to use that was not created in Zbrush?

[APLevitz]

Reminder: conversion tool here (http://66.70.170.53/Ryan/heightmap/heightmap.html).I don't know that it does anything special, but it's the only thing which claims to do what you want.

lovisx:
We're talking about two different things. World space normalmaps use three channels of information in the R G and B slots, and will overlap in strange ways when you simply convert them to grayscale. Tangent space may be as you describe, but color has it's own effect upon intensity psychologically, and the automated conversion to grayscale tries to compensate for this.

[donvlatko]

wow thanks APLevitz;I did't know that this even exist!

BillSpradlin-I had already got maop that was not create in Zbrush....I thought I
can make a revers process for normal map, from NM to DM:)

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