Is there a better way than booleans or hand filling faces to do it? I want to model Anduril, Aragorn’s sword from LOTR, but haven’t so far because of the prospect of having to engrave it.
I suppose I could just displacement map the engravings, but that is poly heavy and kind of cheating to me.:no: I will if I have to, but…
reference 3648 x 926
y not just bump map it? the engraving doesnt go to the edge, so you wont be able to tell. Click twice on the Nor so its yellow (a negative nor is recessed).
Bump mapping most likely won’t hold up to inspection in close-up renders. I’m having this problem with the crack arcs on my stargate, the nor map looks ok from a distance but not so much close up.
Make the bump map at least the same resolution as the final render. Higher is better!
You can also use the new tangent space normal mapping (2.43) – Both photoshop and the gimp have plugins that will convert a greyscale image to a TS normal map. Make sure you use a lossless image format when importing to blender or you will get strange artifacts. Holds up well under close scrutiny.
GreyBeard
Hey, that does look pretty good…
Um, could you point me to one of those Photoshop plug-ins? I’ve been googling around but I can’t find anything that I definitely know is the right thing. Is it this?
Yes that’s it. A tutorial that uses the plug-in to put some text on dice here:
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/showthread.php?t=43
GreyBeard
Thanks. I just downloaded the latest RC and made a couple of test maps. I’ve mapped the texture to nor and clicked the nor ts button, but it doesn’t seem to be working!
The left picture shows two maps that were generated with slightly different depths mapped just to nor. The right shows the same two maps also mapped to color. It seems to work fine in the material preview window, am I doing something wrong?
Here’s the original image of the engravings after a touch of gaussian blur in PS, and the nor map generated by the Nvidia plug-in. I still can’t get the ts normal mapping to work…
[Edit] Huh… For some reason it’s working now. Anyway, here’s a test of the final bump map. Thanks for the help GreyBeard.
Click for a larger image. (3500 x 250)
