Hi guys,

I'd like to create my base normal map in a 3d program (3ds) by baking high poly to low, then add fine detail in either Photoshop or my own program. I did research and there doesn't seem to be a good method, they are either blended in Photoshop (bad) or in a shader; I think that's because the tutorials aren't written by programmers.

I was thinking I can convert the two normal maps to vectors then combine them with a weighted sum, renormalize and convert them back to a normal texture. Will that be correct ? Do I just add the vector components or do I only offset them with the binormal and tangent parts of the fine detail map. I'm not really sure how to do it.

Thanks.

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/blending-in-detail/

In the days of Doom3's development, using Maya, they would model all the detail they needed into the hi-poly model, then created a plugin that would spit out a low-poly model, and a normal map to 'recapture' the detail that was lost in the polycount reduction when rendered on the low-poly model.

That was ten years ago.