Jump to content

DOWNLOAD MODS

Are you looking for something shiny for your load order? We have many exclusive mods and resources you won't find anywhere else. Start your search now...

LEARN MODDING

Ready to try your hand at making your own mod creations? Visit the Enclave, the original ES/FO modding school, and learn the tricks of the trade from veteran modders...

JOIN THE ALLIANCE

Membership is free and registering unlocks image galleries, project hosting, live chat, unlimited downloads, & more...

Texturing: Normal Maps (PS)


InsanitySorrow
 Share

Recommended Posts

Normal Maps (Photoshop)

TexturingNormals.png

This workshop is going to walk you through the basics of creating a normal map in Photoshop, amd hopefully I can share some helpful hints & tips along the way.

Requirements:

Photoshop

Photoshop DDS Plugin - Can be found here

Basic working knowledge of Photoshop

Step 1: Open your texture

The way we're going to make our normal map is by taking our texture and running the Nvidia Normal map filter on it. This is one way of making normal maps, but it's also the easiest and with a few settings tweaks and a little extra work, you can make some really good normal maps. So go ahead and open your texture in Photoshop, for this tutorial I will be using the texture for my Celtic shield.

Normals_01.jpg

Step 2: Alpha Channel

The alpha channel on our normal map controls the level of shine applied to our texture in-game. There are a few ways we can do this, we can fill it with a black colour (Dull, 0 shine) or a white colour (Shiney) or use grey for something inbetween. This can take a a lot of tweaking depending on the amount of shine you want and where you want the shine to show. But we have a quicker way of getting a decent effect which we can tweak a little easier.

CTRL+A to select, CTRL+C to copy your texture, navigate to your Channels tab, click the Add layer button (this will add Alpha 1 layer), then paste in your texture.

Normals_02.jpg

You'll notice it's become a grey scale image, the lighter areas will shine more than the darker areas. With the Celtic Shield texture, it's the metal areas that will have more shine and that's what we want.

With this as a base you can select areas of your alpha channel and change the levels of grey/white to adjust the shine as needed.

Step 3: Normal Map Filter

Still on our Alpha channel, make sure you click the RGB layer, this is the colour layer for our texture. Then click your layers tab, this is where we'll do the last bit of our work.

Okay so go to Filters>Nvidia Tools>Normal Map Filter

This will bring up the filter screen for our normal maps, and it's here we'll go through a couple of things before applying the filter.

The Filter Type section you see with options like 4 sample, 3x3, 5x5 ect. These control the level of softness applied to our normal map. A sample of 4 will provide a rough texture, which is great for the likes of stone. While a setting of 5x5 would be perfect for metal.

You will need to play with these depending on the texture you're creating a normal map for, harder surfaces will use 4 sample or 3x3, while softer surfaces will use the others. Sample 9x9 would be used for the likes of cloth, really soft materials.

Normals_03.jpg

Below that we have scale, now I always leave MinZ at 0, this controls the minimum height of the filter when applied, but I've never noticed it doing anything useful. Next to that we have scale, this controls the depth of the normal map, so a higher number will increase depth. Now I never, EVER go above say 5 here, you can achieve far nicer results by keeping it to a low scale, I usually go for 2 or 3 depending on the texture. The reason for this is we can take a little extra step to bump up the depth of the detail without it looking a mess. I'll explain that later.

Normals_04.jpg

Next up is the 3D View options, the only thing that needs to be checked (and is by default) is Animated light. The rest you can leave unchecked, though I myself will check Alpha Blending and Filter.

Normals_05.jpg

The last thing we'll be using is the Alternative Converstions on the right of the screen, for this I keep Max (RGB) selected as it seems to provide the best results. The only other setting we will use there is Normalize only, this will be explained later.

Normals_06.jpg

So one last thing, up at the top you will see 3check boxes for Y, X, Z, these will allow you to flip the height (depth) of the texture, the one mostly used is Y. This would be used to flip the texture and make your patterns for example engraved rather than pronounced.

Step 4: Generating the normal Map

Using the best settings from the information above, let's generate a normal map. Now for this workshop and my shield texture I will use the following settings, but you can choose whatever is best for your normal map.

Invert Y: Checked

Sample: 3x3

Scale: 2

Alternate Convertions: Max (RGB)

3D Options: Animate Light, Filter, Alpha Blending

Normals_07.jpg

With our settings all setup we'll click the OK button and let Photoshop apply the filter. This is the result I achieved.

Normals_08.jpg

We have our normal map :clap:, See not hard at all was it? :D, We can now save the normal map, I save as DXT5 with Mip Maps, but DXT3 is also a good choice here.

Additional Step: Adjustments

Oaky so as I mentioned earlier, we can take an additional step here to boost the depth/detail of our normal map. It's not a hard step either. So in our Layers tab, duplicate the Background layer, it doesn't matter what you name this as we'll flatten the image later. I just left it as Background copy.

Normals_09.jpg

Next set the blending mode to "Overlay", you'll notice the normal map becomes sharper, deeper and brighter. We have to be careful how many times we do this, you can end up making something to sharp ect. But if you run a gaussian blur on subsequent layers with a value of 1 or 2, it'll smooth our the sharpness while keeping the depth. For the tutorial I duplicated the layer another two times and ran a 1.0 blur on the top layer

Normals_10.jpg

That looks pretty good to me, so we'll flatten our image now as we'll no longer be editing it. Next open the Normal Map filter again. Change the Alternate Convertions setting to normalize only, leave everything else as is and click ok. This will fix the colours channel of our normal map since we were editing it after running the filter.

And this is our final result:

Normals_11.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the problem is that the DDS plugin is a Windows executable, so I can't get it installed. I'm running Parallels now, so maybe I should try again... Parallels allows you to run Windows in a window under Mac OS.

I have to admit I've only been picking at the tuts on TESA. I just haven't had time to go through them! I'm too busy modding :lol: So I'll have a look at your tut for GIMP! :cookie:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Ok question...I load my custom texture, CTRL+a just seems to select the image.There`s no sign that the image has been copied or duplicated. I don`t waht to change the base .dds,right? Ok so I dupe it in the image tab and then go into Channnels and add "channel"(there`s no option for "add layer"), this is labled "alpha" but the image just turns solid black with none of the original image showing...lust a 1024X512 black rectangle. So, what am I doing wrong here?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nope there isn't any messages or anything saying it get's copied, but it will do, well copied to the clipboard :yes:, Yes we are modifiying the based DDS file, but then later we use Save As to save it as a new file without overwriting. It's just easier this way, well at least to me.

Okay so you go into your Channels Tab, click add channel and a new black one is added labeled alpha?, Hmm sounds right to me, you then paste your texture into this channel and the black will be replaced with a greyscale version of your texture.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Thanks for this. Anywhere I can find some more specific or general purpose normal mapping tips? I'm getting better slowly through trial and error, but there are still some problems I'm clueless about. For example, when I try to make normals for cave rocks I do the overlay duplicate trick and successively add more gaussian blur on each layer for more depth, but when testing the normal I often notice that the light gets very "warpy" when I move it around. If I do the same on Bethesda's textures it doesn't appear nearly as noticable. Not really sure what I'm doing wrong.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...