Combine Normals

Laying one normal map over another in an image editor flattens both of them. Two half strength bumps average out into one quarter strength bump, and the surface ends up softer than what you started with.

This combines them properly, so the big shapes from the base map and the fine detail from the overlay both survive. The usual case is a baked normal map plus a tiling detail map like fabric weave or brushed metal. Blend them once here and ship one texture instead of sampling two.

Do both maps need to be the same type?

Yes. Mixing a DirectX map with an OpenGL one gives you detail that lights backwards. Convert one with Flip Green first.

The detail is too strong.

Scale the detail map with Normal Strength before you combine them. Adjusting afterwards changes the base shapes too.

Related: Normal Strength · Flip Green · Renormalize

All tools

Edge Padding: Bleed UV island colors outward into empty space so textures stop showing dark seams at lower mip levels. Runs in your browser.

ORM Packer: Combine ambient occlusion, roughness and metallic maps into a single packed RGBA texture, with control over which map goes in which channel.

Tiling Checker: Preview a texture tiled 3x3 with the seams highlighted, plus a half-offset view, so visible edges and obvious repetition show up before the asset ships.

Material Preview: Preview albedo, normal and ORM maps together on a lit sphere or cube, without exporting into Unreal or Unity to check how a material looks.

Height to Normal: Convert a height, bump or displacement map into a tangent space normal map, with adjustable strength and a choice of DirectX or OpenGL output.

Normal Strength: Scale how much a normal map bends the light, without rebaking it. Keeps the map valid instead of breaking it the way a contrast slider would.

Levels: Set the black point, white point, midtones and inversion of a roughness, AO, height or mask texture, with a live preview.

Flip Green: Invert the green channel of a normal map to switch it between DirectX and OpenGL, which fixes normals that light inside out.

Rough ↔ Gloss: Convert a roughness map to glossiness or smoothness and back, for assets moving between engines that expect one or the other.

Renormalize: Restore a normal map after resizing, blurring or compression has weakened it, without changing which way any of it points.

Material from Photo: Generate albedo, height, normal, roughness and AO maps from a single photo, as a starting point you then tune.

Seamless Maker: Turn a photo or texture into one that repeats cleanly, by shifting it by half and blending the mismatched edges away.

AO & Curvature: Get ambient occlusion, curvature and cavity maps out of a normal map, with no high-poly mesh and no baker, for edge wear and dirt masks.

Channel Split: Split a packed ORM, RMA or mask texture back into one grayscale map per channel, exported individually or as a zip.