I wish to create a normal map for skin pore details only, not defrmation, how do I do this?
nly way I can kinda do this is to delete mst of my lower sub d levels, there must be a better way?
Thanks.
I would do a cavity mask, clean up the unwanted areas, create an alpha from the selection, then take that alpha into crazybump, xnormal, or something else that makes normals from a displacement, then use that to create just the skin pores.
You don’t have to delete lower levels. Just drop down one level from the highest and create your map. Normal Maps are calculated based on the differences between the current level and the highest level. So if you’re at level 6 of a 7 level mesh, the only details that will be calculated into the map are those of level 7.
The only time you need to delete any levels is if there are higher levels that you don’t want included in the map. Lower levels don’t matter. For example, to create a normal map for high frequency details and a displacement map for medium frequency details you’d do the following:
- Load your mesh and store a morph target.
- Divide, detail and save.
- Drop down a couple levels.
- Create the normal map.
- Delete the higher levels.
- Go to level 1 and switch to the stored morph to restore your base mesh.
- Create the displacement map.
So what would you do if level 6 say, is more than 500k?
Good scoop. Thank you Aurick! I didn’t know it was that easy… 
Thankyou aurick.
For some reason I always thought I had to be at SUB-D level 1, hence why I was deleting all lower levels to achive what you said.
So what would you do if level 6 say, is more than 500k?
You would go down untill you are at a level that is within this limit. There still isnt enougth deformation change between these levels to make a normal map retain un wanted displacment. My maps from testing this are only showing micro details, not huge displacments, perfect.
I havent done any further test, but I asume making normal maps this way would help smooth bad seams by only making normal maps based off micro details?
