Normal mapping

I started to brush up on normal mapping in Maya for parts of the environments. I was looking through different tutorials on the Internet and some of them mentioned the NVIDIA Texture Tools. It showed them using a normal colour texture in photoshop and using the Nvidia plug-in to generate a normal map from this simple colour texture."It creates normal maps from height maps for per pixel rendering." This was a really quick process to get loads of detail from the original map.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Below is what I achieved.

Another way I found from watching a tutorial was a programme called Crazy Bump. It works in the same principle as the Nivdia plug-in but it allows you to change more options. Also not only can you create a normal map you can out-put a displacement map, specularity map, a diffuse map and a occlusion map.

This is such a nice tool that will work wonders with the texturing process.

http://www.crazybump.com/

Here what I have achieved.