Fellow hobbyist here with a few questions ( Normal maps )

[PixelBerry]

Hello! So I love playing around with textures as a hobby, but I'm by no means good at it, I'm pretty much a headless chicken just doing whatever I think works. I do have a few questions regarding this subject tho.

So I have heavily modified a normal map for the legacy body (with permission of course), and have created abs for it, however I want to make the legs and arms appear more toned, I have tried hand drawing muscles and tried looking for images or textures that could be used but without luck, so my questions are is there any websites with high quality full body pictures from all angles of a muscular female that doesn't cost me my liver and all that?

I also have issues with making the textures seamless, even after using blender with a model of the standard avatar, there still are seams when I test them in world at least where the torso and the waist connect and in a few other areas but they aren't as noticeable.

Honestly any tips and tricks when it comes to creating normal maps for the body, especially muscle details are welcome, I really want to learn more when it comes to normal maps and specular maps. 😄

 

Thank you!

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Wow. Kudos to you and your bravery. I don't think many artists hand-paint normal maps. The two usual approaches to creating them are to generate them mathematically from a separate, higher-detail mesh, or to create a grayscale bump map (possibly by hand) and then convert it. Normal maps are not intended to be editable or even be usable images; they're rotational data that's been jury-rigged into a form that existing image file formats can store, and it's only coincidence that they're as human-readible as they are.

Your first big problem is how LL didn't line up UV borders very well, particularly the bottom edge of the upper body's UVs with the top edge of the lower body. (pic #1). The borders don't just have different total lengths, but individual corresponding edges don't match angles or lengths. You can't get textures to line up perfectly across these borders on a per-pixel basis for anything that uses BoM.

The other problem is how your mesh body handles its inherent normals along the outer border. If Legacy's modeler did not configure custom base normals into the vertices along the joints, those body parts will appear to have a sharp seam between them even if the vertices line up perfectly when both parts are worn (pic #2). This is because every vertex has its own personal idea of which way "straight out" is from its spot on the mesh, and by default it's auto-calculated as an average of the face angles around it. But the bottom rim of the torso doesn't know anything about the angles in the legs (and vice versa) -- all that face and angle data is in a different object! So it can't average their facings and ends up using purely its own flatness.

If the Legacy mesh has this issue (and it might not -- good mesh bodies don't), you can correct this somewhat with a normal map, at least in theory, but it won't be perfect and it'll probably take a lot of fussy trial and error.

Edited May 17, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[PixelBerry]

21 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Wow. Kudos to you and your bravery. I don't think many artists hand-paint normal maps. The two usual approaches to creating them are to generate them mathematically from a separate, higher-detail mesh, or to create a grayscale bump map (possibly by hand) and then convert it. Normal maps are not intended to be editable or even be usable images; they're rotational data that's been jury-rigged into a form that existing image file formats can store, and it's only coincidence that they're as human-readible as they are.

Your first big problem is how LL didn't line up UV borders very well, particularly the bottom edge of the upper body's UVs with the top edge of the lower body. (pic #1). The borders don't just have different total lengths, but individual corresponding edges don't match angles or lengths. You can't get textures to line up perfectly across these borders on a per-pixel basis for anything that uses BoM.

The other problem is how your mesh body handles its inherent normals along the outer border. If Legacy's modeler did not configure custom base normals into the vertices along the joints, those body parts will appear to have a sharp seam between them even if the vertices line up perfectly when both parts are worn (pic #2). This is because every vertex has its own personal idea of which way "straight out" is from its spot on the mesh, and by default it's auto-calculated as an average of the face angles around it. But the bottom rim of the torso doesn't know anything about the angles in the legs (and vice versa) -- all that face and angle data is in a different object! So it can't average their facings and ends up using purely its own flatness.

If the Legacy mesh has this issue (and it might not -- good mesh bodies don't), you can correct this somewhat with a normal map, at least in theory, but it won't be perfect and it'll probably take a lot of fussy trial and error.

Eh yeah, whenever I draw something I tend to avoid the seams as much as possible, thankfully I didn't have to touch the torso seam when I added the abs, however the normal maps I'm modifying was made for the belleza freya body so that is probably why there are slight seams at the connection of the upper body and the lower body, however when I try to correct that, smudging and blending the seams via blender with the standard avatar model it doesn't seem to work at all, it only makes it worse than it was, but I also do not have a dev kit for legacy to be able to do that on the legacy dummy, so I have no idea how the legacy body works with normal maps and how to be able to make it seamless. But I'm grateful for your information, thank you! ^^

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

4 hours ago, PixelBerry said:

so I have no idea how the legacy body works with normal maps and how to be able to make it seamless.

Check if there's a seam when you use a totally flat normal map (RGB 128/128/255 everywhere). If there isn't, the inherent normals are customized correctly.

[PixelBerry]

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Check if there's a seam when you use a totally flat normal map (RGB 128/128/255 everywhere). If there isn't, the inherent normals are customized correctly.

I tested it out, there is no seam thankfully!

[animats]

On a related note, I'm testing some rendering stuff, and would like a few simple non-avatar, non clothing objects with good normal maps for test purposes. Something like a table or chair, not too complicated. I have some simple objects like bricks and corrugated metal, and need something slightly more complex. Marketplace links are fine. I'd prefer the objects be mod.

Also, some things that use specular maps usefully. Thanks.