Example of tileable normal maps — How to Create 3D Tileable Normal Maps

Tutorial by Liam Yoo

How to Create 3D Tileable Normal Maps

Purpose of This Tutorial

There are three main goals in this tutorial:

☑ Creating 3D tileable normal maps to represent highly detailed surfaces with much lighter resources.

☑ Understanding advantages of using multiple graphic tools and learning how to use them effectively.

☑ Recognizing difficulties of normal map texture mapping and training how to overcome it.

Icon images of Quixel Suite 2

Required Skills and Knowledge

An icon of effective tools — Effective Mapping Tools

An icon of tileable normal maps — Tileable Normal Maps

An icon of how to apply normal maps — Applying Normal Maps

Step 1: Draw shapes of the tileable map using Photoshop.

A shape of the texture map

⚬ Create new file with 1024 x 1024 pixels in the Photoshop.

⚬ Create new layer.

⚬ Draw shapes of the tileable map: colour is not important in this step.

An image about offset filter A

An image about offset filter B

An image about offset filter C

An example of offset usage

The result of the shape drawing

⚬ Use Filter-other-offset to create the tileable shape.

Step 2: Use NDO to convert from shapes to a 3D normal map.

The first normal map

⚬ Before you work on this step, please learn how to use NDO here.

⚬ Create two normal maps using the shape.

Strong normal map — Strong normal + Regular Normal

Regular normal map — Strong normal + Regular Normal

Combined normal map

⚬ Strong Normal ⇨ Regular Normal ⇨ Overlay

⚬ Go to the channel tab, and invert Green Channel.

☛ Tips: The normal vector is encoded as Red:128, Green:128, Blue:255.

Step 3: Use NDO to convert the normal map to a displacement map.

A height map

⚬ Go to the top right corner of the NDO window.

⚬ Open the dropdown menu and select Map Converter.

An image of map converter — Map Converter ⇨ Normal ⇨ Height ⇨ File

An image of map converter — Map Converter ⇨ Normal ⇨ Height ⇨ File

⚬ Convert the normal map to a displacement map.

A normal map image — Normal Map and Displacement(Height) Map

A displacement map image — Normal Map and Displacement(Height) Map

⚬ Save the displacement map as a jpg file.

Step 4: Sculpt detail of the mesh on ZBrush.

3D modelling from the height map

⚬ You can learn basic sculpting skills of ZBrush here.

⚬ Import the displacement file in the Alpha Brush panel.

A image of ZBrush alpha brush

⚬ Choose Plane3D in the current toolbox, click Make Polymesh 3D button and subdivide mesh.

A image of plane 3D

⚬ Click Masking ⇨ Mask By Alpha, set Z Offset to -3 in the Deformation panel.

A image of the M
asking

⚬ Sculpt using ZBrush.

The result of 3D modelling

The result of the normal map

⚬ Choose the Normal RGB Mat to export the normal map to Photoshop.

Step 5: Create a diffuse map and check the result.

The result of the 3D texture

⚬ You can learn how to use DDO and 3DO here.

⚬ Create a diffuse map using DDO.

The result of the diffuse map

The result of the normal map

⚬ Apply diffuse and normal maps in 3DO.

The final result

⚬ Check the final result!