Crunchtime

Hi,

i will present you a technique to create a more 3 dimensional
normal map out of a 2D-Painting like this one:



You will need to have the painting on a seperate layer!

There are two ways to create a normal map:

1. Use a high poly mesh and bake the 3D information down to a texture
2. Use a high map (a grayscale map; the color of each pixel indicates his
height in the 3D space; black: low, white: high) and let the nVidia Photoshop
plugin convert the heigth- to normal information.

It would be very time expensive to do the ivy as a high poly model,
so you have to use Photoshop and there are 3 ways you can go:



1. Desaturate and bring up the contrast
2. Lock the layer and fill it (Shift + Enter) with the foreground color (black)
3. My way: fill the layer like in 2. but add an inner glow with that values:



The Result:



1. To noisy and to flat
2. To flat
3. Nice 3D :)

It's not the greatest normal map ever but it costs you just a few seconds
to bring up your painting a little bit more 3D.

But there is one mistake! I said the white pixels of a highmap are high
and the black ones are low. So the inner areas of my ivy are low and the
outer are high: my plant is caved in!

To make the ivy caved out, you have 2 ways:

1. activate "invert X" in the options of the nVidia Plugin.
2. invert the painting and calculate the map without activating "invert X"



The result:



1. The better way, the edges are ok
2. No good result, the edges seem to be graved.

In my case this technique put my texture on a new level because i got a really
more intensive 3D effekt because the light influenced the ivy more
stronger than without using the inner glow effect.

If you need more structure, you can deal with the noise slider of the
Photoshop effect panel.

Feel free to try it with different values and write comments & critique to
this tutorial. I hope it will help someone.