[How-To] use Photshop/GIMP normalmap filter plugins

This post is less of a tutorial but more of a documented worktrough of Sascha Henrichs tutorial, which can be found here: http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2008/10/normalmap-creation-with-photoshop-and.htm Many thanks to him.

I will cover an approach on creating more realistic normal maps out of photo resources in a later post.

The following screenshots were made in Photoshop but the tutorial works the exact same way with Gimp.

1. Open a texture of your choice

2. Desaturate the texture and duplicate the existing layer 2-4 times.
Each of these layers will represent a detail level like lets say "very fine", "fine", "middle", "large" and "very large".
 

3. Apply a normal map filter with relatively low intensity/scale (in this example: 4) to the bottom layer. Set the opacity of the other layers to 0% to instantly see the result.
 

4. Switch to the next layer and apply a slight gaussian blur filter. I've set it to 3px for this example. Gimps gaussian blur seems to be less intensive so I would suggest to set it to a 2-3 times higher value. Afterwards add a normal map filter to the same layer with a higher scale value than used for the previous layer (8 in this example).
 

5. Change the layer blending to "overlay" and merge down the 2nd lowest to the lowest layer.
 

6. Open once more the normal map filter window but set the conversion mode to "normalize only" this time and apply.

7. Repeat the steps 4 - 6 for all remaining layers. You will usually use higher values for the gaussian blur and normal map filter at each layer.

The final result of this example looks quite heavy due to the used values.
layer 1: 12px - 32
layer 2: 6px - 16
layer 3: 3px - 8
layer 4: 0px - 4

The final results can be adjusted by using different values for both the normal map filter and the gaussian blur filter to give certain detail levels less or more intensitivity.
Besides the opacity of a layer can be decreased before merging it down. This will reduce the intensitivity of the corresponding detail level, too - just in a different way.

After lowering the normalmapfilter scale values as well as changing the lowest (2nd lowest) layers opacity to 0% (50%) the result changes as follows:

cheers




Many thanks to Sascha Henrichs for the inspiration by his tutorial.