How do I make a normal map with a height map in the alpha channel?

[enderandrew]

There are a variety of tools to produce a normal map from a texture (Nvidia's DDS tools, Photoshop filter, etc) but I don't believe either create a height map.

How are people producing normal maps with height maps in the alpha channel?

[MadGypsy]

google knows

You could write a javascript script to do this with ease.

. Import the 2 different images
. Overwrite the normal map alpha channel with any (non-alpha)channel from the height map
. Export the results

I may take a stab at this when I get home. I make no promises.

[enderandrew]

I found resources for putting a height map into the alpha channel by various means, but not how to generate the height map to begin with.

[MadGypsy]

blender

[nahuel]

I make it manually with gimp, but

try xnormal

free and fine

it will produce normal maps and heightmaps and normal with alpha channel

[Tea Monster]

I bake out the height map in blender. Xnormal will produce them as well.

[enderandrew]

I bake out the height map in blender. Xnormal will produce them as well.

Looks like you need a high poly and low poly model to compare, so I can't really produce them for textures that don't have them currently.

[nahuel]

Looks like you need a high poly and low poly model to compare, so I can't really produce them for textures that don't have them currently.

not really!! you only need the texture

[enderandrew]

not really!! you only need the texture

Can you use xnormal to produce a height map from a texture?

[talisa]

with paintshop you can use a masking layer to add alpha channel to a texture if you select 'source opacity' to create mask from,
which will take the darkness of the mask layer and use that as alpha for the underlaying layer....
as in darker is more transparent and lighter is less transparent....
so you could use a B&W bumpmap for the mask layer and it will embed the bump-map as height-map