Bumpmap from Photo

[HapZungLam]

From my limited knowledge there has no way but to do it by hand. I believe you understand what i mean by that. There are ways that you model it out then bake it as a normal map but thats seem an even longer process.

Sorry, couldn't help....

[Ian Jones]

There's a photographic technique for producing normal maps from real objects, but I don't have the link saved I'm afraid. It seems pretty good, but not the most straightforward approach and fairly technical. Basically it involves lighting the object from the top, bottom and both sides each with a different colour. You'll have to search for 'Normal Map Photography'.

[Epsilorn]

Yes I knew that tecnique but what if the reference is a photo and not areal object? (like if I downloaded it from web)

[Ian Jones]

yeh, somewhat tricker then in that case. Maybe you should use vectors to draw out that decorative pattern and recreate the shapes.

[compugeek915]

The way that gnomon teaches you is that you take the photo run a high pass filter and then for the bump you use PS desaturate feature. It is basically using the the levels feature in the gimp to adjust it and switching it to black and white. Below i have posted the best results i was able to get with it, not bad for a 4 min job.
http://images4.fotki.com/v38/photos/5/566827/2397034/rendered-vi.gif
BUmp example
http://images3.fotki.com/v30/photos/5/566827/2397034/molding_bumpcopy-vi.jpg
HTH
mike

[Epsilorn]

@ compugeek: Thx for advice! This is the way i thought it should be done, in fact I obtained a result similar to yours the same way. The problem that arises from this method (problem I think is not solvable in this way) is that light information come from high-left corner of ohot causing bump to be misplaced respect to reference.

@Ian Jones: The idea of using vectors could be the better... a little long, but probably with better results, i'll try!! Thx

[Prince3d]

The way that gnomon teaches you is that you take the photo run a high pass filter and then for the bump you use PS desaturate feature. It is basically using the the levels feature in the gimp to adjust it and switching it to black and white. Below i have posted the best results i was able to get with it, not bad for a 4 min job.
http://images4.fotki.com/v38/photos/5/566827/2397034/rendered-vi.gif
BUmp example
http://images3.fotki.com/v30/photos/5/566827/2397034/molding_bumpcopy-vi.jpg
HTH
mike

Hi There:)

Which Gnomon tutorial did you get that from?

Cheers

[compugeek915]

I got it from the texture painting: fundamental gnomon dvd by Paul campion. I actually got the high pass filter from another tutorial. The high pass helps a little bit with light information but the light and dark brushes in maya would help more.

[EricChadwick]

The jpg artifacts are really painful once you try to use this as a height map. I find the Reduce Noise filter in Photoshop is pretty good at removing that though.

But in the end, you can't really avoid the problem of burned-in lighting. High Pass only makes it worse, from a height-map point of view, since it adds its own emboss-like artifacts.

IMO, best bet is to recreate the heightmap yourself, either through photography or through modeling. Besides, there's the whole pesky issue of copyright infringement when grabbing images from the web.

FWIW, here's the normal map photography site.
http://www.zarria.net

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