Help With Normal Map

Support Materials and Textures
1

Ok Blender Gods I need some guidance. I’m working on a model and putting a normal map on it. I have exported the size of the texture to 4000 and used GIMP to edit the texture map. The problem I have is that everything comes out jagged. I know that it’s mapping the lines I have in GIMP. Which I’m using black lines on a white background for the normal map. My question is can I do something to smooth this out further? I have already blurred the lines in GIMP and if I continue to blur them the lines don’t look right. The picture is a finger and I’m trying to normal map the knuckles. Is there something that I’m missing in Blender or is this how it’s going to be or do I need to try a different method?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h100/cyberpatriot/BArtistHelp.jpg
BArtistHelp.jpg800×600

2

Did you try UV unwrapping that mesh? You can do that and apply the texture through a UV channel, or you can Sculpt those knuckles using a brush with the normal mapped texture that you edited.

3

Holy schizer, I was so focused on the normal map I didn’t think of sculpting. Great idea lunatic.
I should have mentioned that I unwrapped the mesh and applied the UV texture with normals turned on. I exported the mesh with a size of 4000, which doesn’t give me the fine detail I want.
Can you point me in a direction on how to sculpt with a normal map? I wasn’t aware you could do that.

Thanks for the tip lunatic.

4
5

Use the multiresolution sculpting and bake the difference between your base mesh and a high resolution sculpted mesh to a normal map

Multiresolution http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Multiresolution_Mesh
Sculpt mode http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Sculpting
Baking http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Render/Bake