nDo - normal map generator

[jinsley]

Just found this while doing my daily reading... looks really interesting and thought I would post the link...

 

http://philipk.net/tutorials/ndo/ndo.html

[Tommy L]

Excellent stuff.

[Dave Buchhofer]

It works pretty damn nicely too. working with it now

[Tommy L]

Ive never used normal maps, is it something I will notice a big difference over bump maps?

[abmitalia]

Thanks alot. Great program and extremly usefull.

[jinsley]

It works pretty damn nicely too. working with it now

 

Yeah, I did a huge section of zinc paneling this morning which turned out real nice.

[jinsley]

Ive never used normal maps, is it something I will notice a big difference over bump maps?

 

Bumpmaps:

Single axis hieght information maps that the renderer can use to "shade"

the surface it is applied to. (1D Bump Maps). The hieght info is usually

stored as a grey scale 8 or 16 bits per pixel image file where the low

values (black) represent the low areas (valleys) and the high vlaues

(white) are used to represent the the high areas (peeks).

 

 

Normalmaps:

 

Three axis hieght information maps that the renderer can use to "shade"

the surface it is applied to. (3D Bump Maps). The X, Y, or Z axis specific

hieght info is usually stored as a 8 or 16 bits per pixel color image file

where the low values for the x axis (black) represent the low areas

(x-axis-dents) and the high vlaues (RED) are used to represent the

high areas (x-axis-protrusions). Green is used for the y axis in the

same way and blue for the z axis. Because normal maps contain

hieght information for all three axis (x, y, z) it is posible to discribe

a complete 360 degree curvature on all 3 axis in the shaded surface.