Applying height-maps/normal-maps to geometry and transform it?

Support Modeling
1

I’ve noticed some people doing really amazing things with Substance and powerful engines like UE4:

https://twitter.com/donarceta/status/1097315363786768387

For example, that mesh is just a basic shape with a shader applied. Unfortunately, I’m working with Godot and that’s not really possible. Is there a way of “baking” this? By baking I mean applying the mesh transformation statically within Blender, so I can have a high-poly, then create a low-poly, and then export a traditional diffuse + specular + normal map of the mesh.

2

Look here
https://cgmasters.net/category/free-tutorials/textures-shaders/

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3

Try using the displacement modifier.

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4

Works perfectly! Is there a way of applying the displacement modifier from a heightmap with triplanar texturing?

5

Make triplane texture, bake it to UV’s and use the modifier. It only sort-of works when projected in cycles that way. You can’t actually change the mesh geometry with a material node texture-- that only works at render time in cycles.

Alternately, you can set the displacement to ‘bump only’ and that should influence the normal map bakes, but it will not be as large an effect as actual displacement and retopology.

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6

Thank you so much for the detailed answer.