Craters on forehead

thistledownsname

I'm trying to make someone's face look like a lunar surface and running into some difficulty.  I made up a simple enough field of craters from tiled pictures and applied that as Bump, Normal, and Displacement map for the face (and the rest of the body, where it works fine).  On the cheeks it gives me a satisfactory look, but it doesn't seem to be working on the forehead.  After a lot of poking at it I got a very shallow effect, but I'd like to make it more prominant.  Any advice?

Here's the current version.

The maps I'm applying have plenty of craters in the target area.

Richard Haseltine

How did you make the normal/bump maps?

thistledownsname

Terribly, I'm sure.  I took the picture from here, cropped it, doubled the scale, and pasted it multible times until it completely tiled over the standard G3F UV bump maps.  I've then messed around with moving some craters around and changing contrast.

I did try an online page to create a Normal map from the tile map, but it didn't seem to help really.

Richard Haseltine

Your bump and normals probablt treat the dark areas as recessed and the light areas as rasied, rather than reading them correctly as shadows. You really need a tool that will allow you to specify the direction of the light and estmate the bumps and normals from that. I just had a fiddle in Bitmap2Material, with which In am not remotely skilled:

thistledownsname

So I should look for a field without shadows, and set the colors as black for craters and white for not?

Richard Haseltine

You could try that, but I think it will be tricky to find a suitable image. Auto bump/normal geenration is iffy - there are several tools that try to do it (B2M, Crazy Bump) but I've not been greatly impressed with the results. The free/bundled tools tend to be very simple-minded and don't really work for anything remotely complex.