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Using a normal map to generate surface detail

putka
polycounter lvl 6
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putka polycounter lvl 6
Right, so this is gonna sound a bit weird. I have my low poly model and the normal map baked from the zbrush sculpt. Due to some disk cleaning stupidity I lost the sculpt but would like to somehow get it back.

Is it possible to convert the normal map into displacement and use that? Would the quality just be too abysmal? I'm a Maya user btw.

Thanks.
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  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    You could try using a tool with normal map to displacement texture conversion like crazy bump, but it's not going to work great.
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  • Autarkis
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    Autarkis polycounter lvl 8
    You can try running Recuva (https://www.piriform.com/recuva) and see if you can recover the ztl itself from the hard drive. It has worked fairly well for me in the past to recover accidental deletes on hard drives.

    Otherwise, like zac wrote, normal to displacement will be your best bet ( but it's not going to look great honestly.)
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  • EarthQuake
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    EarthQuake mod
    Yeah it won't really be worth your time to go from normal map to displacement back to highpoly. Normal maps only contain directional information, not depth, so much of the content will simply be lost in the conversion. You could try something like Knald which will do a pretty good guess in terms of depth, but its still not going to give you a quality high poly model.

    Some sort of disk recovery software like mentioned above is likely a better use of your time.
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  • Farfarer
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    Farfarer
    Autarkis wrote: »
    You can try running Recuva (https://www.piriform.com/recuva) and see if you can recover the ztl itself from the hard drive. It has worked fairly well for me in the past to recover accidental deletes on hard drives.

    Otherwise, like zac wrote, normal to displacement will be your best bet ( but it's not going to look great honestly.)
    Yeah, Recuva's saved me a few times before. I keep it on my USB stick with a bunch of other diagnostic type tools in case of emergency - it's been really handy.
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  • putka
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    putka polycounter lvl 6
    Yeah I used some software back when it happened, recovered a few things but still lost a lot.

    And I figured normal to height would be pretty crappy.

    Thanks :)
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