CGTalk - Normal map to Bump map ?

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Asgorath

06-03-2003, 04:27 PM

Ok that's sound a little stupid to work backward, but sometimes you have to when you can't use last highend software...

So I need to get the Bump map (Height map) from a Normal map.

I already have a plugins for Photoshop which is able to generate the Normal map from the Bump map (Here (http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=ps_normalmapfilter)). But it will be great if I can do the invers process.

Anyone know a program, or plugins for Photoshop to do that ? Is it possible ?

EricChadwick

06-04-2003, 12:44 AM

Not possible, or at least not well. Normal maps are just differences in slope, not actual height values, so if someone wrote a converter they wouldn't know from the normal map alone that a peak is different from a valley... they both look the same in most normal maps (blue).

If in a bind, you could try extracting the blue channel from RGB. But again, the valleys are just as bright as the peaks. And the blue channel has a low value range.

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