Renzatic on 25/2/2005 at 17:40
I know that sooner or later some of you are gonna want to port custom textures into the game, and since most people probably don't have a good copy of Lightwave 8 or Max 7 they'll be relying on Photoshop to make their textures.
As such alot of you are probably gonna be tempted to use the Nvidia Normalmap plugin to do your normals....and I'm here to tell you...DON'T! It's asstacular at best, a glorified emboss filter that'll give you crap results.
The best go-between I've found is the (
http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/ati_nmg.zip) ATI Normalmap Generator. The normals it produces are much higher quality than what you'd get out of Nvidia's offering, and it's a standalone program to boot. It's rather simple in design, you don't have a GUI and you can't tweak any settings within it, but once you get used to using it it's the best straight up normaler you'll find.
To go along with this, I'll write a little tutorial on how to make normals based off of heightmaps soon.
bukary on 7/5/2005 at 18:46
Well, Renzatic, are you going to write this tutorial? It would be VERY helpful.
I've just started making custom textures for T3Ed, and nVidia filter is really... not good. :( Perhaps someone knows how to create normal maps "by hand"?
BlackThief on 7/5/2005 at 19:18
Quote Posted by bukary
Well, Renzatic, are you going to write this tutorial? It would be VERY helpful.
I've just started making custom textures for T3Ed, and nVidia filter is really... not good. :( Perhaps someone knows how to create normal maps "by hand"?
eventhough the ATI generator is able to create some really nice normalmaps you can hardly work with it. there aren't ANY settings (at least on my version) so it's really hard to get the right result.
you get the best results, when you combine a normalmap generated from a 3d high-poly model and a normalmap generated with the photoshop plugin.
of course you can create your normalmap completely by hand - the best way is to work with a grey-scale image - but it's really a lot work and in some cases it just doesn't look good.
bukary on 7/5/2005 at 19:39
Just a quick comparision...
DOCwall512B texture from TDS.
Original bump map:
Inline Image:
http://img118.echo.cx/img118/7585/docwallorigin2dt.jpgAnd here's the bump map created with the use of Nvidia filter only (no other filters; I tried to make it as close to original as possible):
Inline Image:
http://img84.echo.cx/img84/7307/docwallbump7tq.jpgThe result is not very impressive. I wonder how were TDS maps done...
Quote Posted by BlackThief
you get the best results, when you combine a normalmap generated from a 3d high-poly model and a normalmap generated with the photoshop plugin.
Hmmm... Do you know any tutorials about this?
Anyway, thanks for the advice!
BlackThief on 7/5/2005 at 22:10
Quote Posted by bukary
Just a quick comparision...
DOCwall512B texture from TDS.
Original bump map:
And here's the bump map created with the use of Nvidia filter only (no other filters; I tried to make it as close to original as possible):
The result is not very impressive. I wonder how were TDS maps done...
I guess the way I mentioned before - modelling + photoshop. that's the way normals are usually done.
here's a example - one of my textures for the darkmod:
ingame
(
http://www.thedarkmod.de/misc/mosswall1.jpg)
and the normalmap, which was generated in maya by Corth and overworked in photoshop:
Inline Image:
http://www.thedarkmod.de/misc/brickwallmoss_local.jpgthere're normalmap plugins for almost every 3d software out there - just do a google search. the only tutorial I know about normalmaps is this one, but that doesn't help very much in most cases:
(
http://www.zarria.net/)
Fingernail on 8/5/2005 at 10:07
A bit off tangent, but you can get normals from 3D models via a Doom 3 console command 'renderbumpflat' - that's if you can't find a decent plugin for your 3D app.
Someone made one for lightwave, but it seems to make flipped normals; bizarre. A combination is best, or render some noise on top of the plain 3D one. Failing that, a displacement map -> polygons method works wonders.
bukary on 8/5/2005 at 11:22
Hmmm... GIMP filter seems to create better maps than Nvidia filter. Unfortunately, this DDS plug-in does not support DXT1, right? I cannot save my map as .DDS DXT1 (only DXT2 and DXT3).
OrbWeaver on 8/5/2005 at 11:42
Quote Posted by bukary
Hmmm... GIMP filter seems to create better maps than Nvidia filter. Unfortunately, this DDS plug-in does not support DXT1, right? I cannot save my map as .DDS DXT1 (only DXT2 and DXT3).
Works fine here - DXT1 is available in the dropdown list box when exporting a DDS.
Having saved the texture as both texture_N.dds and texture_D.dds in both PCTextures and Textures, the normal map is not displayed in game (the texture is displayed fine). Is there some other step that needs to be taken to activate the normalmap, or is it the case that normal maps cannot be used without 3DS Max?
bukary on 8/5/2005 at 17:32
Quote Posted by OrbWeaver
Works fine here - DXT1 is available in the dropdown list box when exporting a DDS.
DTX1 is avaible in my dropdown list, but it is inactive. I cannot choose this format. What's wrong? :confused:
Quote:
Having saved the texture as both texture_N.dds and texture_D.dds in both PCTextures and Textures, the normal map is not displayed in game (the texture is displayed fine). Is there some other step that needs to be taken to activate the normalmap, or is it the case that normal maps cannot be used without 3DS Max?
I use 3ds max to create material libraries (and that allows me to have normal maps in the editor). I guess you would have to replace some existing textures with custom ones in order to have normal maps without 3ds max...
