I’ve read on some pages while I was doing my own normals in photoshop for an object that after finishing doing normal maps that I should normalize the normal map to bring back the length of my normals back to the value of 1 since applying overlay with blue channel turned on completely destroys the depth information and overblows the normals length. And these strange pixelated edges have appeared on my normal maps which seem to disappear a bit or lessen when I renormalize. This is when I have multiple layers stacked on each other with blend set to overlay and all top layers have blue channel disabled while the bottom layer blue channel is enabled (to avoid overblowing the blue channel and to losing some of the depth data). Since I’ve disabled the blue channel on the top layers do I need to merge the layers and normalize them now or is the normal map good to go, if I use normalize on it the pink pixelated edges are decreased but if I don’t even turn off the blue channel on all of the layers my blue channel gets overblown and most of the depth data is lost but there are no pixelated pink shapes and then I normalize it the normal map looks great in viewport and shadows fall smoothly over it but all the depth is lost. Sorry for such long text, lol but my final and basic question is: Should I even normalize the normal map if I turned off the blue channel data on all the top layers (only the bottom one has blue channel turned on)? Basically the blue channel is no longer overblown. I might even use some gaussian blur on it altogether to get rid of some of these pixelated shapes.
When should I renormalize?
Nightmare106
#2
Nevermind, found the answer to my problem by myself. The strange blurred normals were caused by the fact they were low resolution, applying slight Gaussian blur managed to fix the problem and gave me smoother outlines. As for normalization, it’s kinda obvious to normalize the normal map at the end.