Texture to Normal

Week Four

Hey, everyone this time I will show you how convert textures and make an usable normal map and a specular map to give the texture a little boost. So we had to make an cobble texture, but I decided to make a brick texture, because it was a little bit different. Before starting to do anything I had to convert the image to 16 bit, because we had to do a lot of blurring and on an 8 bit image you would probably get a banding in the texture. 

After that I use the offset to my texture reduced my texture by half, if the size of my texture was 1024 my offset is going to be 512. After the I got sharp edges in the texture and using the crop tool to sample bricks with similar colour to fix it and get the result you see on the top.

Next, I copied the texture to a new layer, so I could soften the high level detail and leave on the big shapes. I used the surface blur on the layer, however, the settings for every texture could be different, but the result you want is to soften the noise details and leave the large shapes intact.

After, I had to run the X normal, but get much better results and the bricks to pop out, I ha to duplicate the layer and apply 1- 3 pixels Gaussian blur and after that set the mode to Overlay. I repeated that until I was satisfied with how strong was the normal map. Then I selected all the layers and copied it to a separate layer and used the X- Normal Normalize, because of all the overlaying I have pushed the colours of the normal map beyond the limit and this way I corrected them. On the image below you can see the result of the final normal map.

After that I made a specular map of the diffuse. I made an greyscale of my original image and worked on it with the levels tool to darken them a little, because brick are not supposed to be shiny, even if they are new, they have a more matte colour to them and that is what I did. You can see on the image below.

We had to use the same principle's with the rock texture, which we did after that. You can see the diffuse, the blur, the overlay- blur normal map, the normalized normal map and the specular map.

And this is the final result of the textures rendered in Maya.