Post your: completely undocumented (at leaast on FP) techniques you've personally discovered

[GreyGeist]

One of my biggest finds is on how to convert object space normal maps into tangent space. Basically, taking the rainbow normalmaps used in things like Skyrim characters and putting them into something normal 3D games/programs can use. The steps are pretty simple, and go like this:

- Export your model to an OBJ
- Import it into Blender
- Duplicate the mesh
- Merge tris into quads on the duplicate
- Subsurf the duplicate your desired level. The more you subsurf, the more detail you can bake into the low poly. Use simple subsurf if you don't want the smoothing.
- Add a displacement modifier to the duplicate.
- Create a new texture for it, and have it use an image texture of your object space normal map.
- Displacement modifier should use UV texture coordinates, in normal direction.
- Tweak to your desired strength, and keep in mind it can actually look STRONGER as tangent space
- Apply the subsurf first, then the displacement.
- Bake normals from the high poly to the low poly
- Save the generated normal map
- Remove artifacts
- Finished!

[editline]26th December 2014[/editline]

[IMG]http://a.pomf.se/gywjgz.png[/IMG]

An example of a Skyrim face normal map, ported into Blender Internal.

[BlueFlytrap]

That is clever; but there are better ways to go about it.

You can bake objectspace normalmaps directly to tangentspace. Will probably net you some cleaner results.
It used to be having to use xnormal to do it but recently handplane made it a lot faster.

Just nab the objectspace normalmap and the lowpoly model (remove any overlapping uv) and it will spit it out a tangent map that you can even set explicitly for source.

Here's a recent example.

[IMG]http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/361/8/0/drctfvygbh_by_blueflytrap998-d8belq9.jpg[/IMG]

[GreyGeist]

removed