Hi guys, and hope I posted this in the correct section.
I’m looking for any resources on how to properly make normalmap alphas, and heightmaps for textures for use in parallax specular materials, and also dx11 tesselation mats.
I know white is high, black is low… but… are there tutorials on how to do this properly… say in photoshop or gimp? I’d like to create one for some brick walls i’m using, but have no idea where to start… I have my brick texture, and also a normalmap for specular highlights (i didn’t make the specular map)
“white is high and black is low,” I’m afraid there is not more to know. Extracting the heightmap from a photo is very difficult (unless you have additional knowledge about the incoming light in the photo and the material); thus, usually, you have to use your imagination when creating the heightmap. Additionally, it often helps to blur the map in the end in order to have enough grayscale levels for Unity to compute the normal map.
You could try Bitmap2Material plugin for unity - it will generate the normal and height maps for you.
As for specular maps, here’s a great tutorial on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gqp4bNJ52M