Creating Normal Maps from photos: possible and easy

[Farid]

I stumbled upon this interesting tutorial from Ryan Clark: Normal Map Photography

Concretely, this method allows you to create a quality normal map from a real world object simply by using a flashlight (or any other light source), a fixed camera and some work on an image editor.

A few pics of the process

The resulting Normal and Height Maps

Simple, yet effective.

 

[NocturnDragon]

Also check http://www.crazybump.com/ from the same author of that article.

I tried it and with some tweaking you can get pretty nice results.

 

[AlNom]

Pretty cool Now if only Take 2 would make a Max Payne 3.....

 

[Mintmaster]

If you guys like this you should take a look at Polynomial Texture Mapping research done at HP. I think it's over 5 years old, but they do a decent approximation of all diffuse lighting effects (bump shadows and interreflection too) with 6 values per texel.

They have a few tools available, like a way to generate the PTM from as many photographs as you want with different lighting angles, and a tool to extract normal maps from a PTM if you want.