Creating Normals in GIMP...

[Savage]

I just happen to stumble on a cool plug-in for GIMP allowing you to convert any diffuse texture or bump map into a normal map. This should be of interest to those wanting to convert some 2k4 maps into UT3 because 2k4 doesn't support normals; however, you can take the existing bump maps and using this plug-in, convert them to normals giving you that UT3 detail. Check it out:

I quickly drew up a Bump map for demonstration purpose so don't expect much and using this plug-in, made a normal.
You can find this plug-in here

For those of you not familiar with normals, look here

[DW_WailofSuicide]

You may be interested in this: http://www.normalmapper.com/

[Savage]

Sweet, thanks! It looks like a pretty handy piece of software and believe me, I will be putting it to the test. Thanks for sharing this. As you may know, I am always very interested in manipulating polygon surfaces by normal maps and the like, tricking the eye into believing it is looking at a 3d object when in reality it is flat. Very interesting stuff. I'll let you know how well this thing works and thanks again.

[Savage]

Wow, this thing is really cool. It allows you to set the normals of individual pixels and it allows you to create normals and some basic shapes; However, unfortunately I haven't yet figured out how to generate a normal map from an image, I'm not even sure if it can. This program in combination with the GIMP normal plugin and Blenders normal bake, their are no limits to what you could do with this program. I plan on using this with all my normal maps. This thing is really awesome, thanks!

This program would actually be well suited for doing those fine detailed touch-ups on a normal map that was produced from another program.

I remembered you saying you used Maya. I'm not sure if it allows normal bakes but if it doesn't, Nvidia has a nice free program that does normal bakes called Melody. Check it out sometime. It does very well, I have used it in the past. Nvidia Melody Normal Generator

[Savage]

This program is very nice. I can see how it could be very useful for smoothing rough normal maps or editing individual pixels. For instance, the normal I created above was a bit rough or bumpy, more so than I wanted.
So I used the program you showed me to attempt to smooth it out. This was my first time using it so keep that in mind. I used the magic wand to select groups of pixels and used the average to make them alike and it gave the appearance of smoothing.
I like how you can zoom in and change individual pixels, very nice.