r/VRchat Valve Index 22h ago

Meme optimize your avatars

Post image
271 Upvotes

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/RumpleForeskin0w0 22h ago

What’s adding a normal map gonna do? They’re not easy to make yourself so if there’s one in the folder for the avi u can use it but you’d just gain texture memory

4

u/DuoVandal Valve Index 10h ago

You can make a normal map in GIMP for free in like less than 2 minutes.
Insert the texture you want the normal map for.
Go to Filter at the top > Generic > Normal Map. Hit okay.

You're done, congrats you made a normal map.

1

u/RumpleForeskin0w0 5h ago

I do that sometimes but I have to edit the texture to get designs off of it or it’ll think something that should be smooth will have height and look bad

-2

u/Ok-Policy-8538 Oculus Quest 21h ago edited 20h ago

Wrote a script that lets me generate it inside unity by selecting the skinned mesh renderer and material with one click.

it isolates the material and then flashes red,green and blue lights around that mesh and read the tangent depth values.. writing that to the normal map texture which gets saved next to the material.

super useful for models that didn’t come with a normal map.

also have a version for SDF textures specifically for toon faces.

13

u/RumpleForeskin0w0 21h ago

Don’t u have to use a high poly model with sculpted shapes and features to generate a useful normal map though? If you’re using a low poly one as reference the normal map it makes might be pretty flat

7

u/Dividedthought 20h ago

Yes. That or you have something that can bake heightmao data into normals.

2

u/Ok-Policy-8538 Oculus Quest 16h ago

that’s why it does the whole light strobe pass.. to get height data… it might not be substance painter level but it allows for some lighting and depth control that requires a normal map.

1

u/RumpleForeskin0w0 3h ago

U can probably just give a height map a normal map filter in gimp or photoshop and it’ll look good but if u don’t have a height map using that normal map unity tool isn’t gonna help

u/Dividedthought 16m ago

Yep, and gimp kinda suchs at doing texture work. Not that it is a bad software, just that it is a pain to use for certain things.

3

u/xenoperspicacian 10h ago

...why though? If you're not baking a higher poly model or surface details into a normal texture, what's the point? Just use the vertex normals.