4.4.2.Normal maps in photoshop

Now i will try to simulate in photoshop the same effect as shown above with lights within maya but this time using layer styles.
I will set the background color to 128 128 255
I will need 5 layers, one for each light ( made 5 layers and changed their fill opacity to 0 then i will make selections and fill them within each layer but only the effects will be visible)

for Red normal light apply an effect like below (bevel and emboss), uncheck use global lighting ,set the angle to 0 (the light will come from right),set altitude to 0 (light parallel with the screen) ,highlight mode set to overlay with color 255 128 128 (RGB) to lighten only the red channel and opacity to 100% , set opacity for shadows to 0 (don't need that)
you can play however you want with the settings under structure but you have to make sure that all the effects have same settings

for Red sucker light copy and paste the last effect and change the angle to 180 deg ( light coming from left) and change color to 0 128 128 so it will subtract light/darken only the red channel

for Green normal light paste the same effect but change the angle to 90 deg (light coming from top) and change color for the highlight to 128 255 128 to lighten only the green channel

ADVERTISE

for Green sucker light paste the same effect but change the angle to -90 deg (light coming from below) and change color for the highlight to 128 0 128 to darken only the green channel

and finally for the blue channel apply an inner shadow effect , uncheck global lighting , distance 0 , choke 0,set size to whatever you had for the size of the bevel and emboss and set color to 255 255 128 to darken only the blue channel , opacity to 100

The fun part is that now that you have the layer styles in place you can just go and adjust the size in pixels for the effect and play with all the other attributes within bevel and emboss, if you want to "carve" detail you just have to change the direction in the bevel and emboss from up to down for the red and green layer styles, you can blur the selections with gaussian blur to achieve smoother results.You can duplicate this set and alter the attributes again ... and do all kind of crazy stuff, its up to you to experiment.You can even place the layer sets on top of other normal maps and will display ok ( just run nvidia normal map filter with the normalize option on the final texture).