Creating Normal Maps from a Texture? VTFEdit or Other

[Mr. Someguy]

Anyone have any good ways to make a good normal map out of a texture? I have VTFEdit which is able to generate them, but I don't know what settings to use for it. On default settings ( [I]Kernel Filter: 3x3 | Height Source: AverageRGB | Alpha Result: Set To White[/I] ) they seem very flat and dull compared to the official normals.

[xDShot]

This kind of tools will never get a 'good' normal map as it usually being made by baking from hi-res models.

[Ferdam]

If you really want to do normals from textures you'll probably have to manually clean them a lot before you can use or the results won't be good

About the settings, it depends on how evident you want the effect to be. I think the ones generated from textures look bad if set too strong, so I think you'll have better results if you stick to [I]4 sample[/I], [I]average rgb[/I] and a [I]scale[/I] between 1 and 10.

[Szraneraxtq]

[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;51357215]Anyone have any good ways to make a good normal map out of a texture? I have VTFEdit which is able to generate them, but I don't know what settings to use for it. On default settings ( [I]Kernel Filter: 3x3 | Height Source: AverageRGB | Alpha Result: Set To White[/I] ) they seem very flat and dull compared to the official normals.[/QUOTE]

[url=http://crazybump.com/]CrazyBump[/url] is usually the best way to go (despite its demo having a 30 day limit.) The developer wiki article for [url=https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Bump_map]bump maps[/url] has a good list of programs you can use too