Paint to edit normal map?

[ChimpanG]

yes, but surely you could have tried it first:P

[scadbrad]

Yeah, I had already tried it and it still worked. :D I just wanted to make sure that by editing it, I wasnt messing up something behind the scenes that I didnt know about. Simple enough, thanks!

[PhilOsirus]

If you want to understand which colors to use, make a normal map render of something like a pyramid from top view. It will give you an idea as to which colors correspond to which angle.

[mindrot]

A tip- neutral normal map colour in RGB is: 128, 128, 255

~M~

[Tonedef]

Having made normal maps from images I can say that the clone tool does wonders, and I have had absolutely no problems with it.

[scadbrad]

So like a bump map, I can just paint it? As painted in the picture below, I am doing an some etchings on metal. I just used photoshop and didnt even use Zbrush this time. By just painting it in Photoshop it seems to give me more control and faster results. I just used the standard blue for the back ground and chose a dark blue to carve in and a white to stick out. I see that darker carves in and lighter expands out, but I dont know what the other colors do like pink. The colors represet different angles?

[Serul]

It doesn't quite work that way.

What you can do is simply paint a traditional black and white height map and convert that to a normal map using the (free) NVIDIA normalmap tools for photoshop.
When you do this however keep in mind that 50% grey (R 128, G 128, B 128) will end up being the neutral blue.

[JuddWack]

poopinmymouth.com has a section of his normal map tutorial where he talks about editing out mistakes of a generated normal map in photoshop. You might want to check it out.

[scadbrad]

It doesn't quite work that way.

What you can do is simply paint a traditional black and white height map and convert that to a normal map using the (free) NVIDIA normalmap tools for photoshop.
When you do this however keep in mind that 50% grey (R 128, G 128, B 128) will end up being the neutral blue.

Thanks for this plugin tip! It works great.

[SHEPEIRO]

When you do this however keep in mind that 50% grey (R 128, G 128, B 128) will end up being the neutral blue. thats not quite correct me thinks, it completely depends on what variations in tone are imeediatly around it, as the normal map is generated from lightness value diferences. so a block of black or midgrey or white will all appear as neutral blue(R 128, G 128, B 128) but i a thin line of mid grey sandwhiched between black and white lines will have a distinct colour to it (red or green depending on direction).

the colours (red and green channels) represent the angle of the surface (in X and Y), not the height, the blue channel level tells the render engine how offset the angle is to the actual surface (i think :-Z) a bit like a pre-computed red and green channels.

if your using photoshop to generate surface details and overlay them to a high poly generated map, its a good idea to bring the level of the blue channel down (select blue channel, press cntrl L, and reduce level to 128) otherwise it can effect the normals generated from the highpoly. there is an option in the Nvidia plugin to generate them this way aswell, they should appear mid grey with pink and grenn tones.

hope that helps :-)

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