Generating Normal Maps

Support for generating normal-maps is built-in to PixelGraph. They can be manually "baked" into the project, or automatically generated during publishing as-needed.

Using the User Interface

Properties

• Filter - One of the above normal-map filters. Default value is Sobel3.
• Strength - The strength of the generated normals. Default value is 1.0.

Filters

• sobel3 - This is the most commonly used filter for generating normal maps, and uses a simple Sobel3x3 filter.

• sobel-high - A variant of the Sobel3x3 filter using high-pass filtering on the kernel to produce "single-pixel" normals. This will limit normals to only being generated for "lower" pixels.

• sobel-low - A variant of the Sobel3x3 filter using low-pass filtering on the kernel to produce "single-pixel" normals. This will limit normals to only being generated for "higher" pixels.

• variance - An experimental filter using a combination of down-sampling and variance-mapping to better capture both high and low frequency curves.

Manual / Command-Line Usage

The following properties can be manually specified in the Material Properties file.

normal:
  filter: sobel3
  strength: 1.0

To pre-bake the normal map, you can run the following command.

pixelgraph generate normal <options>

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