Pen of the Avatar Normal Mapping

Shroud of the Avatar

On yesterday’s Pen of the Avatar Geoff Mellon, lead character creation artist at Portalarium, gave us a overview of how to easily create normal maps using a relatively inexpensive add-on program for Photoshop. Despite some technical difficulties, he provided some great advice on what “normals” are, how they work with models, and his process for creating them.

As noted before, Portalarium (as part of the crowdsourcing initiative) is actually improving models that they purchased from the Unity store and releasing the updates to the original artist so they can sell the new version (with the only stipulation being a “as seen in Shroud of the Avatar” tag). Very generous!

Find Out More

Here are the resources noted in the video:

• Quixel nDo2 Normal Map Tool
• nVidia Normal Map Tool
• Mayang Textures

Enjoy!

Thanks to Geoff, Joseph, and all of the developers at Portalarium for another great Pen of the Avatar!