Height to Normal

A height map says how far each pixel sticks out. A normal map says which way the surface is facing. Getting from one to the other means measuring how fast the height changes: the steeper the slope, the further the normal tips over.

Strength is the setting that matters. Too low and the detail vanishes as soon as it is lit. Too high and flat areas turn to noise, because you are amplifying whatever compression mess is in the height map along with the real detail.

DirectX or OpenGL?

Unreal and 3ds Max want DirectX. Unity, Blender and glTF want OpenGL. If dents come out as bumps you picked the wrong one, and Flip Green will fix it without converting again.

The result came out noisy.

The height map is probably 8-bit and banded, and every band edge becomes a little ridge. Blur the height map slightly first, or lower the strength.

Can I do this from a photo?

Not directly, because brightness is not height. Material from Photo works out a height map first and goes from there.

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.

Combine Normals: Layer a detail normal map over a base one and keep the detail from both, instead of averaging them into something flatter than either.

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.