I have a model from a game that I want to 3D print. The model is not high poly, and a good deal of its surface detail comes from a tangent space normal map. I want to apply this surface detail to the mesh itself before printing, using the Displace Modifier.
I cannot find a way to use a Tangent Normal Map with the Displace Modifier. I tried baking Object Space Normals but that doesn't seem to be an option either, as the Displace Modifier works with black and white displacement maps. So I need to somehow get one. I've found various Displacement baking tutorials out there, but they are all talking about baking a high detail model (using multires modifier) to a lower detail one.
So, I somehow need to get the displacement change of the tangent normal map as a black and white displacement map with .5 Mid Level, and then Bake it to a texture. Is there nodes that I can run a normal map through to convert it to a black and white height map? In that case, I could just plug those into an emission shader and bake that. Or is there some other option?