Making Normal Maps from clothing textures
READ THIS! It helps to know these things in the tutorial:
Overall Photoshop skills - advanced begginner/intermediate
Layers - intermediate skills including blend modes
Emboss = Menu: Filters > Stylize > Emboss
HSL = Menu: Image > Adjustments > Hue / Sat...Also, know that there is a plugin ( found on the home page below this tutorials link ) that will make a simple bump map ( grey scale ) image into a normal map. You can often use the clothing texture and find it's most contrasting channel ( red, green or blue ) then use some graphics manipulation to create the bump map. I'll go into this in the making clothing by scratch tutorial.
You may have seen them in your project folder. They are named body~stdMatNormalMapTextureName.bmp. They look blue and embossed. And that is exactly what they are! A Blue layer (Color 8080FF) with hard light blending over an embossed and saturated version of your main clothing texture. The jist of these maps are to simulate more depth by using a texutre to change shadows rather than using more smooth polygons. Here's how you make them (or a reasonable template to use with your clothing:
Start with your main texture from the project folder (first box in figure 1). Make a duplicate layer just in case you mess up in Menu: Layer Duplicate Layer. Select the duped layer and Select Emboss and choose an angle of 90 and height of 1... more can be too much offset. The amount can be as much as you want for deeper details but 50% is probably fine. Now use HSL to give the image a Saturation of 75%.
FIGURE 1:
You should have what looks like the first part below in figure 2. Now Create a layer over the Background copy. Select the Paint bucket tool or press the g-key on the keyboard for fast selection. Set the forground color to 8080FF by clicking on the current forground color box to bring up the color picker and find the input box at the bottom with a # (pound or number sign) to it's left and enter 8080FF in it then hit ok. Fill the new layer full of solid blue. Under the Layers tab is a box for blending modes (circled in red of the middle window) Set it to Hard light as indicated. You should have the Final Product. Save it as the file name "body~stdMatNormalMapTextureName.bmp" in your projects folder and reload your maniquinn in Body Shop. If things are too detailed or stand out ish, use the Background copy layer with HSL saturate or use a grey (808080) color brush to make the detail flat. I've even included what the outfit looks like on my sim below.
FIGURE 2:
The effects are subtle at times but you can make them as grand and stand out more!
Here is the outfit above on my Raver girl sim:
I mentioned sequens and suede. The best way to to get these effects is to experiment with the embossed layer with noise and negative colors or wild vibrant colors. Even making shapes in weird places on the texture gives interesting results. The map changes the way shadows are cast on the clothing. This makes for interesting effects no matter what you do with the Normal map. Taking the origional nude bmp file and applying this teqnuiqe and messing with it can make for skin tight clothes or wrinkles that look just like wrinkles that seem like they are part of the physical mesh.