Hi, Can you output a Normal map from World machine?
I’m not that familiar with World machine yet so I may have missed it.
thanks,
Mike
It will be the case in WM Pro but I don’t know if Stephen plans to make it available in WM Standard/Basic too. Anyway, it’s not yet possible with WM 1.25 
well nuts :?
Ok thanks for the info.
Mike
you could try combining a few angle functions… just a thought?
I’m not sure why you would want a Normal Map from a WM heightmap… I don’t see where that could be used for anything.
That being said, there are applications out there that will convert any bitmap into a normal map which could be used on a heightmap image saved from WM.
Maybe to export a higher resolution normal map and then use it to imply greater detail in real-time?
A few issues would be: NM’s require lighting to work (they are fake surface normals through lighting), so terrain triangles that are more parallel to the light rays would have a substantially noticeable less-NM effect; the resolution of the NM would have to be a magnitude greater than the resolution of the heightmap, so a 256x256 heightmap with an 8192x8192 normalmap overlay would only give a 5x5 faked resolution increase, so the NM would essentially only be visible and usable from a distant camera; if used in a standard DX9/DX10 rendering engine, there are limits with the texture resolution on the specific card, for example there may be limits of 2048 or 4096 in the specific card the end-user has, which would limit the maximum faked resolution increase factor.
NM’s would almost always be part of the actual texture layers applied, not the heightmap itself. As a professional video game level designer, having used NMs for textures such as dirt and cliff rock that include normalmaps (on engines such as Unreal Engine 3), the visually apparent increased heightmap quality is exceptional when compared to last-gen engines without NM support.
By applying the NM through the texture layers, a visual resolution increase can have an order of magnitude well into the thousands through tens-of-thousands.
A WM heightmap doesn’t just have to be used for terrain you know 
I’ve made alien skin bump and color maps from voronoi for instance. Came out very nice.
Well anyhow to answer the question, you can get the DDS tools plugin for Photoshop from the nvidia website and create normal maps from greyscale images for use in your desired 3d program.