I googled this before and apparently there is a node in material editor called “normalfromheightmap”, but I"m not sure how to use this. I tried converting to a normalmap in in “Crazybump” and it (the normal map) doesn’t look quite the same- a bit off and loses some sharpness and detail overall looks more pillowy compared to the original bump map. I have feeling Unreal’s normalformheight will have better results. How do you use it?
Just out of curiosity, do you know of any games/game engine that used the more traditional black and white bump maps instead of normal maps?
Bump maps take more processing power and games very early on used normal maps since it contains all of the information necessary, what would be better is to convert it to a normal map beforehand, you can do that in Photoshop, there’s a filter under the 3D category to convert to a normal map.
Crazybump has decent controls for the normal map conversions, its probably one of the better options, compared to Photoshop or Unreal. Just got to play with the sliders. Although Allegorithmic or Quixel probably have the best modern tools for that kind of texture generation.
There isn’t a straight conversion of bump map to normal map, so there’s some settings you’ll have to mess with to get the results you want. Photoshop does give you a 3D preview of what the normal map will look like so you can tweak it a bit.