I was just wondering if Blender has the ability to generated normal maps onto a low-poly character from a high-poly mesh. I know it’s possible in some programs (UT3) but I just thought that would be nice.
Yes, I could bake ambient occlusion and fake normals, but that doesn’t work in realtime lighting. I want to use the model in Nexuiz (open-source FPS), so I consider normal-maps of high priority to quality.
What you’re looking for is tangent space normal mapping, which afaik Blender cannot yet bake from a hi to a low poly mesh. I hear it is in the works. Currently only camera space normal mapping can be baked. This can be used on static objects only.
However, Blender can render tangent space normal maps:
Not sure whether the Blender GE can deal with them real-time, however.
I used xNormal to generate the normal maps from high- to low-poly models made in Blender.
Thanks for the replies, it helps a lot.
I don’t want to use it in the game engine, so that’s not a problem, I don’t even need to render it, but I do need my normap to be in B/W, that’s all that nexuiz accepts, should I just be using AO for that? there must be a more accurate way, or is the RGB normap available as a monochrome?
all normal maps use RGB data regardless of their “space” – the normals direction is encoded in the color. if you’re limited to monochrome (I assume you mean grayscale), then you’re talking about a bump map, which is fundamentally different than a normal map. Bump maps encode a height above/below a mean surface based on gray value (white highest, black lowest, 50% gray at the mean level), producing a pseudo-embossed effect.
