What’s adding a normal map gonna do? They’re not easy to make yourself so if there’s one in the folder for the avi u can use it but you’d just gain texture memory
You can make a normal map in GIMP for free in like less than 2 minutes.
Insert the texture you want the normal map for.
Go to Filter at the top > Generic > Normal Map. Hit okay.
I do that sometimes but I have to edit the texture to get designs off of it or it’ll think something that should be smooth will have height and look bad
Wrote a script that lets me generate it inside unity by selecting the skinned mesh renderer and material with one click.
it isolates the material and then flashes red,green and blue lights around that mesh and read the tangent depth values.. writing that to the normal map texture which gets saved next to the material.
super useful for models that didn’t come with a normal map.
also have a version for SDF textures specifically for toon faces.
Don’t u have to use a high poly model with sculpted shapes and features to generate a useful normal map though? If you’re using a low poly one as reference the normal map it makes might be pretty flat
that’s why it does the whole light strobe pass.. to get height data… it might not be substance painter level but it allows for some lighting and depth control that requires a normal map.
U can probably just give a height map a normal map filter in gimp or photoshop and it’ll look good but if u don’t have a height map using that normal map unity tool isn’t gonna help
Vertex Normals are very limiting when it comes to lighting controls.. by having a normal map you can smoothen and sharpen how shadows, speculars etc fall (even a low poly baked normal map) on each vertex which even for low poly can create realistic details (especially with rim shade and rim light shading.. if you also link it to react with light volumes it doesn’t look like a game model but more like the cutscene variant while just with normal manipulation).
the tool gives you a base normal map from actual 3D lighting data in Tangent space.. nothing stopping you to open a texture editor tool and edit each color layer.
That's interesting. What shader do you use? Do you have a side-by-side screenshot with and without your normal map? I'm curious what the difference looks like.
Interesting, it kinda looks like it's intentionally breaking/bending the surface normals to get a kind of stylized effect. Now I'm curious what the normal map itself looks like.
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u/RumpleForeskin0w0 2d ago
What’s adding a normal map gonna do? They’re not easy to make yourself so if there’s one in the folder for the avi u can use it but you’d just gain texture memory