Normal and specular maps.

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

How would I go about making normal and specular maps for my sprites and textures and amazing stuff like that?

Something like this (I pulled these from a demonstration mod, but I don't know how to actually make them)

normal specular

 

Do I use blender?, do I use a convertor?. Please tell me how anyone's able to make them. Thanks

[INfront95]

If you have good hands you can use photoshop and draw color maps yourself. If you don't, just use convertors. You can do maps in many different ways ( i suggest looking for tutorials). For a start you can try to use a program called Materialize (IIRC) its quick , kinda dirty but free map generator.

Edited February 5, 2023 by INfront95

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

What about in gimp?

[ramon.dexter]

You can draw them in basically any graphics editor.

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

23 hours ago, INfront95 said:

Materialize (IIRC) its quick , kinda dirty but free map generator.

I've downloaded it and tried it. It's awful, the controls are vague, the framerate is garbage, the images don't open, and it appears to be powered by unity. Worst of all, there was no readme file in the package leaving me in the lurch about how to use it. I deleted it shortly after :/

 

19 hours ago, DELTA256 said:

What about in gimp?

So it turns out that gimp can make normal maps without an issue, but I'm not sure on how to make specular maps on gimp, I'm assuming it has something to do with one of the "edge" options. Might have to do more research on this.

[INfront95]

16 minutes ago, DELTA256 said:

 I deleted it shortly after :/

 

Your choice

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

1 minute ago, INfront95 said:

 

Your choice

But that's not to say it was bad advice you gave, I solely blame the programmer of the software for not adding a readme in the files of materialize to be perfectly honest with you. Thanks for helping out regardless @INfront95 :)

[Barry Burton]

There's Normalmap Generator: https://github.com/Theverat/NormalmapGenerator

 

It works okay, but you'll get much better results making them by hand usually.

[Mr.Rocket]

A lot of time you can use your diffuse map image and create a gray scale image of it and use it as your specular.

Of course you'll want to make adjustments of it as the brighter parts of the image the shinier.

~ you can also just make a base flat gray image to test with and manually map out where you want it more or less shiny.

Edited February 6, 2023 by Mr.Rocket

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

15 hours ago, Mr.Rocket said:

A lot of time you can use your diffuse map image and create a gray scale image of it and use it as your specular.

Of course you'll want to make adjustments of it as the brighter parts of the image the shinier.

~ you can also just make a base flat gray image to test with and manually map out where you want it more or less shiny.

That actually is pretty helpful, thanks for that!