I was just wondering, anisotropy effects with the new HDRP are really nice and I would like to take advantage of them, but I am unsure of the best way to author the tangent maps that control the anisotropy direction? Does anybody have a good recommended workflow for authoring such things?
For things like normal maps, there is a nice physical method to authoring maps, you can sculpt high detail models and project the detail down onto the low resolution methods. There isn’t a time where you actually need to physically “paint” the normal map.
Is there a similar analog when authoring these tangent maps?
Anistropy is caused by micro-grooves in the surface that all run in the same direction. essentially you just need a normal map that describes the flow of those grooves.
so no, I don’t think there is a way to bake it out from a highpoly.
Yeah I am aware, and HDRP specifically asks for a Tangent map to control the direction of those grooves for shading. That is, a texture where every pixel is a color encoded 0-1 where the RG components represent a vector in tangent space.
If I could ‘paint’ a direction onto a mesh and then bake that out, that would be an example of a nice workflow, but so far I haven’t been able to find a program that can generate such a texture.
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Could you please explain relation between Normal, Tangent and Anisotropic direction?
Substance have flow map brush, krita too. And also, you can use trick explained here: How to paint flow/anisotropic/comb maps in Photoshop. — polycount
Thank you so much for your time.