Shaders can use different techniques to render tangent-space normal maps, but the normal map directions are usually consistent within a game. It mostly works, but it tends to "bend" the resulting normals, so you gotta split the mesh up into some smoothing groups before you run it, and then I usually will just composite this "combo" texture over my orig map in Photoshop."
#PIXPLANT VS CRAZYBUMP HOW TO#
We need to load up a mesh to know how to correctly orient the tangent normals or else things will come out upside down or reverse etc. Then load up your tangent normals, and adjust some sliders for things like tile and amount. Joe "EarthQuake" Wilson said: " a tool that lets you load up your reference mesh and object space map. Image by Diogo "fozi" Teixeira and Osman "osman" Tsjardiwal Diogo has further plans for the tool as well.
#PIXPLANT VS CRAZYBUMP DOWNLOAD#
Osman "osman" Tsjardiwal created a GUI for NSpace, you can download it here, just put it in the same folder as the NSpace exe and run it. To see the results, load the converted map via the Normal Bump map and enable "Show Hardware Map in Viewport". He converts the map by using the same tangent basis that 3ds Max uses for its hardware shader. Normal maps can be converted between tangent space and object space, in order to use them with different blending tools and shaders, which require one type or the other.ĭiogo "fozi" Teixeira created a tool called NSpace that converts an object-space normal map into a tangent-space map, which then works seamlessly in the Max viewport. Using a half-resolution object-space map is one option. Also the three color channels contain very different data which doesn't compress well, creating many artifacts. They don't compress very well, since the blue channel can't be recreated in the shader like with tangent-space maps. Painted details must be converted into Object Space to be combined properly with the OS map.
Harder to overlay painted details because the base colors vary across the surface of the mesh. Slightly better performance than a tangent-space map (but not by much).Ĭan't easily reuse maps, different mesh shapes require unique maps.ĭifficult to tile properly, and mirroring requires specific shader support. Objects can rotate, but usually shouldn't be deformed, unless the shader has been modified to support deformation.Įasier to generate high-quality curvature because it completely ignores the crude smoothing of the low-poly vertex normals.
World-space is basically the same as object-space, except it requires the model to remain in its original orientation, neither rotating nor deforming, so it's almost never used. Object-space is also called local-space or model-space, same thing. Normal maps can be made in either of two basic flavors: tangent-space or object-space.