tutorial: cavity maps and more from crazy bump!
polycounter lvl 18
i had the pleasure of hanging out with ryan at GDC, and we were discussing crazy bump and how i use it to generate cavity maps. i have been using a photoshop action to generate the base map, but crazy bump is better because it doesn't matter if your y is up or down, we use y up, most people use y down, so releasing the photoshop action would be silly cause not many people would find it helpful. i am going to post a tutorial so everyone can do it, and he expressed interest in adding this to crazy bump so you might be able to skip the whole photoshop step in the future.
a little explanation of what is happening here
1> import normal map into crazybump and goto displacement tab, turn enhance detail all the way up.
2> adjust levels like so for cavity map, works great, and dosent have quite the hard edges zbrush generated cavity maps do.
3> if you do the opposite to the levels you get the opposite of a cavity map, i would call it a highlight map, its the highest points on the map and it is awesome for technical stuff, try it out! to really increase the awesome of this map try setting it to screen on your spec and duplicating the layer a few times, also if you blur the duplicate a bit you get great results...
experiment with the levels!! this are just quick starter values to explain what i am doing, for my script the base grey is 128 and that makes the highpoint in the levels directly in the center so the values for both cavity map and spec map enhancer are 128, crazybump seems to use a lighter grey for the base in the displacement, rule of thumb would be try and make the input level value line up with the highest point in the levels, might be easier to understand just by looking at the histogram on the levles.
now go try!
a little explanation of what is happening here
1> import normal map into crazybump and goto displacement tab, turn enhance detail all the way up.
2> adjust levels like so for cavity map, works great, and dosent have quite the hard edges zbrush generated cavity maps do.
3> if you do the opposite to the levels you get the opposite of a cavity map, i would call it a highlight map, its the highest points on the map and it is awesome for technical stuff, try it out! to really increase the awesome of this map try setting it to screen on your spec and duplicating the layer a few times, also if you blur the duplicate a bit you get great results...
experiment with the levels!! this are just quick starter values to explain what i am doing, for my script the base grey is 128 and that makes the highpoint in the levels directly in the center so the values for both cavity map and spec map enhancer are 128, crazybump seems to use a lighter grey for the base in the displacement, rule of thumb would be try and make the input level value line up with the highest point in the levels, might be easier to understand just by looking at the histogram on the levles.
now go try!
Replies
and everyone should know it
otherwise the earth will drown in dumness^^
glad you know, thanks for sharing your superior intellect with the universe.
Arrangemonk: Nice job douching up the the thread.
Thx for the tips, arsh. I haven't done a lot of normal mapped asset generation, so this is something new to me.
- BoBo
for the spec map deal just turn the brightness down to 0..
maybe put it for a crazy bump download help file release?
I want to see that 50 cent zbrush video again. hahaha
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Arrangemonk: Nice job douching up the thread.
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QFT.
yeah site is down, having a baby, scared to spend money.. one day it will be back.
i think a tut comp would be pretty cool, can you give links to any more?
yeah site is down, having a baby, scared to spend money.. one day it will be back.
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actually, it looks like your site got picked up by a web portal company.
Alex
-Buddikaman-
I've been doing something similar to this using xNormal. If you go into Tools, Tangent to cavity map, you can bake your normal into a bunch of different junk. I do EMB and EDT, one to kick detail back into blown out AO areas, and the other to enhance detail.
I'm curious to see how this differs though...totally trying it out at work tomorrow.
"Oh, I'm 1.5 years old"
"OH GOD WHY AM I POSTING HERE?"
To continue/restart this discussion a bit, it's now possible to create proper cavity maps (or more precisely curvature maps) with the last version of xNormal.
The advantage is that you're taking the curvature information directly from your high polygon model, instead of taking it from your normal map, which isn't always right (since it's tangent based, you aren't taking into account the normals of your low poly, often creating false curvature information).
I find the curvature map extremely beneficial to the AO map that xNormal bakes out from my normal maps. I always take the red channel from the curvature map and bake that into my AO map for increased accuracy of shadows etc. Works excellently.
All in good fun!