Flux on 13/8/2008 at 15:08
I've extra bandwith where I host my files, I can set up something like textures.bittersense.com. Or however, you and community feel like it.
Judith on 13/8/2008 at 23:53
That's a generous offer, thanks :) I'm not worried about your server space, rather the monthly quota. Luckily hosting providers like bluehost are not expensive and the quota won't be a problem. Oh, and I guess WordPress wins due to multiple authors feature :)
Beleg Cúthalion on 14/8/2008 at 06:25
Can we simply put that blog thing on Flux's server? It looks a little weird how it loads the pictures, but that might be Opera also. :weird: Anyway, it should be quite easy for us (i.e. the Child of Karras) to set up something like the static mesh platform (or expand this one) and use it the way Massimiliano already has (i.e. a zip/rar file with a couple of similar textures, normal maps and a screenshot of how they look like). That would save us from converting them to/from dds and to have the normal maps separately.
Flux on 14/8/2008 at 07:24
It's on hostmonster. I've 2000gb diskspace, 6tb monthly transfer. Up to now, with all my tds missions and other files, I've used not even 2% of transfer quota.
We're a small community afterall.:p
I guess they have some cpu limit, so advanced and complex php scripts cause problems but we'll be ok with simple downloads.
Mind you though, I'm a php dummy. There are tons of extra features on this server I have like "one-click forum install and all that blah", I've not messed around with them. (it has already tons of stuff like wordpress already.)
I don't know how people will upload their own textures through wordpress. There must be other scripts for servers to upload/host files, just you guys decide and let me know.
Flux on 18/8/2008 at 13:14
İmpressive! Is it just normal map or am I correct to smell something else?:p
str8g8 on 18/8/2008 at 13:43
Looks like the best stonewall I've seen in T3 - tell us how you did it :)
Did you use crazybump?
Renzatic on 18/8/2008 at 15:38
No tricks, and no Crazybump, unfortunately. (I'm too strapped for cash to afford that at the moment. :P). What you're looking at there is just a regular normalmap.
Really, there isn't anything here that can't be done by anyone with a bit of Photoshop/Gimp experience, and more than a little bit of time on their hands. So...the quick and dirty rundown:
Do your diffuse. Get it tileable and all that. Afterwords, throw up another layer and start painting black between your bricks with a soft edged brush. This would also be a good time to dodge, mask, clone stamp out all the shadows and highlights on the texture. Do it all in little chunks to make it manageable. After alot of time and tediousness, you'll have your bricks deshadowed and isolated for bumpmapping.
Now it gets kindasorta fun. Once you're done with everything above, do a color range selection on the black, invert the selection so you've got the bricks, throw a brightness/contrast adjustment layer up, the jack the sliders all the way to the right so they're practically pure white. After that, paint or fill your bricks in to get them as white as you want. Your end result should look something like (
http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/bump_source.jpg) this.
Now for the curvature. Once again, color range select your black, invert it so you've got the bricks, and do a gaussian blur. Simple as that. Do it as much or as little as you want. Generally 10 is best from my experiences. You'll end up with something similar to (
http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/bump_source2.jpg) this
Keep in mind you can get much tighter results than what I'm showing. Since I forgot to save the original I eventually converted to the normalmap I posted, I'm just redoing these as a sloppy rush job for the sake of example.
After that, run your results through the Nvidia filter with a depth of 5, copy and paste your resulting normal to another layer, overlay, do it again, again, again, until your happy with the depth. After that, run your original diffuse through the Nvidia filter, give it a depth of 2 or so (more to taste), paste the results to your other normals, overlay, layer more on if you want (I didn't), normalize the results, and you should be about finished.
Also, if you want more bump detail, just do render clouds on another layer. Don't use colors that contrast too much. I used 2 medium range greys, blurred them, copied a few to different layers, did transform to vary the size, and copy/pasted them all over my bricks. You'll have to jack the Nvidia filter up pretty high to get any bump info out of them, 35 or so did the trick for me. After that, paste them all into one layer, copy that layer 2 or 3 times, overlay them, normalize the results, and you'll have your (
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matt_renzatic/2773487820/sizes/o/) finished product.
In retrospect, it'd almost be easier to model the things.
Judith on 18/8/2008 at 17:07
I guess I have a similar method, yet less time consuming (and probably less accurate too). While making a tileable texture I use some delicate colour tinting, but applied to another layer using one of the blend modes (overlay, usually). It helps to balance the excessive highlights or shadows. I often use levels instead of tweaking brightness and contrast. Sometimes I clone & blur the base image layer a few times (Gaussian blur set to, let's say 5, 10 and 15) to gain better contrast and more intensive colours (depends on blending mode and image brightness, but again it's overlay for most of the time).
If the result is satisfactory, I save the image and desaturate it (I don't convert to grayscale!) using the average method. I do this because sometimes normalmap plugin can interpret colored images in a wierd way. I open the normalmap plugin and set the depth to 5. I clone the base layer, set it to overlay and use the Gaussian blur, setting it to 3. I clone the blurred layer and use the blur again, raising blur strength by 1. I repeat this operation until I see the depth is fine (usually it takes 12-16 layers). Then I flatten the image, of course.
After that I open the normalmap plugin again, set the depth to 1 and in conversion dropdown menu I choose normalize only. Normalizing the normalmap itself isn't that important. It tones the blue channel a bit, which would be pure white otherwise, but it doesn't affect the final (ingame) result that much.
What is important that you should open the 3d preview and see how your normalmap reacts to a light source. Frankly speaking, quite often it fails to do it well :) Or it does, but only partially.
I use the Gimp plugin, so at first I tone down the light, as it's full 255. Reducing it to 192 or 128 helps to see the normalmap result when the light is directly above it. Then I move the light up, down, left and right to see how it affects the normalmap. If the shadows and highlights are all in place, I simply save the image. If something is wrong, I try vertical or horizontal mirroring to correct it.
And when you know that, why would you need Crazybump anyway? :p (ok, to save time I guess ;) )
Beleg Cúthalion on 18/8/2008 at 19:08
So, now you experts... here's the crappy photo I made of a restaurant in my region:
(
http://jayb.ath.cx/Eidos/Timber_org.jpg) (2,34 MB)
And here is what I made of it without satisfying knowledge of PSP which is the only thing I have around here. The background – and it took me quite a long time to recognize that it was in fact the background which made it look bad – is now TENwallB or something by JohnP.
(
http://jayb.ath.cx/Eidos/Timber_tex.jpg)
I think it's good enough for my own mission (you don't recognize the different sharpness levels that much in the game, I was just surprised to see that this is so obvious), but just in case someone's greedy for stock images... :p
