Normal Mapping

To make the surface of a block look "bumpy" we'll use specific textures called Normal Mapping textures, these textures use various specific colours to represent the areas in which light and shadows with appear.

There are easy ways to produce these textures, one such way is the online normal map generator or we could use NVIDIA's Normal Mapping Photoshop CS6 Plugin. I use the Photoshop Plugin, It's only suitable for Cs6, so if you have Photoshop CC, you'll need to use the NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter.

Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) is used in some shader packs to make the normal mapping "3D" it gives depth to the texture whilst not actually introducing any actual 3D geometry, so it's basically faking it!

For low resolution resource packs, POM is not very useful, it doesn't look great cause the pixels of the textures are large enough that you would notice the difference between the surface levels. however this looks great on high resolution resource packs, you can make really fine details using it.

Creating a basic normal map will give you shadows and highlights on your flat surface of a block, which is subtle but looks interesting, and is pretty easy! but adding POM gives it that extra level of depth that is needed to trick you into thinking its 3D

Not all shaders have POM available, the image with the tiles is using SEUS PTGI HHR 2.1

Optifine requires that you name the file identical to your main texture but with _n at the end

e.g. end_stone_bricks_n.png

This first step requires you to remove some detail from your initial texture, or if you've already created your specular texture you can use that.

We are doing this because the normal map for a 32x32 textures isnt actually very clear when yopu create it straight from a highly detailed standard texture, when we run the normal mapping tool we want the texture it'll be overriding to be very simple

In my example i have used my specular map, it's got really defined contrast between the black and red, which will make nice sharp edges for the normal map.

This is a tool created by NVIDIA to be used with Photoshop CS6, it a quick and rather handy tool to do the job, but by no means is it the only way of creating normal maps.

once you've installed the tool to your CS6 it'll be In the filters menu, you'll be able to go through and set settings based on how you want the normal map to come out.

once of the things I wish were better about it is the little example image on the left is too small to see the final result, so I normally just click OK to do the normal map and then if I do not like the result I will undo with CTRL+Z, then go back into the normal mapping tool menu to try again

an alternative to this tool is the Normal Map Online webpage, it is a great free and easy way to quickly produce normal maps, but make sure you always work with copies and check your settings.

once you've used the NVIDIA tool to create your normal map it will look like this. Each of the colours shown are defined to provide a specific depth to the material with the majority being flat surface which is a lavender colour.

at this stage it is not quite ready yet because the tool has created the maps for each tile with no regard to borders of tiles.

You'll need to go though and carefully look at all the borders of the tiles, each tile is supposed to be its own thing, but the normal map tool has generated a little bit that overlaps onto the tile adjacent to each tile.

This is a simple fix, take the colour picker tool and pick the colour it is supposed to be, then use the pencil tool to clean it up.

POM used the alpha channel of the colour space of an image, in layman's terms... the transparency(opacity).

POM will result in a surface that looks 3D, and looks like it goes deep into the block, POM cannot go outside the block, that would be where you would implement a 3D block model, but that's a tutorial for another day.

To achieve POM select an area of your normal map to be "dug" out of the final texture, cut that area onto another layer, and set its opacity. You really dont need to set the opacity that low to achieve a strong effect, my ceramic pool tiles texture only uses an opacity of 97%.

REMEMBER! POM doesnt work with all shaderpacks, so if you dont see it working when you finish and load up the game, it is probably the shaderpack at fault. So far I can confirm that SEUS PTGI HHR 2.1 works with POM