CREATING A
NORMAL MAP
The normal, or bump, map can give a low-poly mesh more detail in game.
Sims 2 to 4 Conversion Tutorials:
Part 4.2 - The Normal
The Normal/Bump texture in Sims 4 is where you can add the appearance of wrinkles, rivets, divots, scratches etc. It has always been used in clothing meshes, and now it’s used for object meshes as well.
If your mesh is fairly straightforward, and you don’t need to add any of the details described, you can use a blank bump map. If not, follow the steps below to create one.
What this tutorial will show you:
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How to create a Normal/Bump texture for your Sims 4 mesh.
What you will need:
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A Blender bake of your mesh (see How to Make a Bake in Blender Tutorial)
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Photoshop CC or another photo-editing software that supports DDS
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NVIDA DDS Tools for Photoshop
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Open your bake image made from your UV mapped mesh.
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Add any details you want to the bake. I’m going to create a couple of dents and some rivets on the 3 protruding parts of the small gear. You can find examples of the details you want to add through an image search or, if you’re artistic, draw/create them yourself in Photoshop.
Rivet - www.ying-fang.com -
After copy/pasting the rivet image into my bake image file, I’m going to use the Quick Select tool to select the round rivet and CTRL+x to cut it from the surrounding picture.
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Next, delete the remaining parts as we don’t them and click CTRL+V to add the rivet back in.
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Click CTRL+t activate “Transform.”The rivet will now look like this:
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You can click and drag the corners to scale and resize.
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Use the rectangular marquee to select the rivet.CTRL+C to copy it and CTRL+V to add two more rivets.
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Activate the “Select” tool, and click and drag each rivet to the position you want.
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In the layers panel, right click on the layer for each rivet and choose “Merge Visible,” reducing the entire image to one layer.
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Click on Filter – NVIDIA Tools – Normal to create the normal/bump map.This will pull height information from the bake image to create your bump.
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Now we just to move the information around a bit to fit the Sims4 normal map formalt.
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In the Channels tab, Click on “Add Alpha” to add an alpha layer.
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Click on the “Red” layer and copy/paste it into the Alpha layer.
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Next, click on the “Green” layer and copy/paste it into both the Red and Blue layers.
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Choose “File – Save As” and save as DDS/D3D DXT5 – Interpolated Alpha.
