Author Topic: About normal maps  (Read 18044 times)

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Offline Flipside

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
If you are using a greyscale height map, then most renderers will support that, oddly enough, the hard part is the glow-map since Freespace 2 looks at them differently to how the average rendering program does.

 
Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
well i mean something that can pull all of the texture maps in... All i have is truespace, LU and PCS right now... i dont think PCS supports normal maps, im not sure.... from what i did last night it didn't seem to, all it did was the coloration. I know LU doesn't support using more than 1 map but it did seem to beable to use the normal. I just wanna beable to see what this looks like with normal and defuse and any other maps i pull in later

 

Offline Flipside

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Yup, there aren't many raytracing programs that will support a normal map, it's really designed for scanline rendering, since it's a 'simple' way to achieve a similar effect to height-maps but is a lot less heavy on the processors. Ray Tracing programs don't consider time as premium.

Truespace can render the object with seperate colour/bump, once you've worked out how to edit the material, but I'm not really versed well enough to tell you how :(

 

Offline TrashMan

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Yup, I may have to reduce the contrast in photoshop for the Thunderbolt. Or were you reffering to the Falcon too?

no worries, I'm putting these ships at sectorgame (with the normal and shinemaps).
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Random question about normal maps: I tried to get them running on a Windows XP box using a Radeon 9800 video card (2003-era.) I have the 3.6.10 beta Assets VP, -normal and -height were enabled, and I'm using a shader pack placed in the MediaVP folder. MVP is selected as a mod. No luck, however!

Is this card simply too old for normal maps?

 

Offline Harbinger of DOOM

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
This is great! I can finally make normal maps!


Thank you, Herra!


* Harbinger of DOOM runs off to make normal maps for all the INFR1 and INFA ships*



BTW, I find CrazyBump to be very useful for making normals; but only if you make them with height maps. It doesn't make very good normals if you just drop a regular texture in it and use it.


Oh and also, the GIMP .dds plugin can conver the purplish normal maps into the SCP-compatible maps too, if you can't afford Photoshoop.
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Offline chief1983

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Battuta, the 9800 is indeed too old.
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
ok question time again. does a normal map affect coloring of a diffuse map? like if im doing large raised panels on a normal map thats a lighter shade than the textured panel, will that screw with the combined look?

*edit

i'm asking because i have no way of testing how both maps look together with out pof'n and tabeling to throw in game

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Battuta, the 9800 is indeed too old.

Thank you!

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Hmm.  I'm surprised I'm the first one to say anything, but those normal maps seems a little too heavy for me, the panel lines seem incredibly deep and cut into the hull.  But it looks like you definitely got the hang of making normal maps down.


They seem really wide, the angle of the sides (correspondences to contrast) of seams doesn't look that bad, but because of the seam lines being so wide they seem to go deeper down (naturally). Besides that, the maximum angle of normal that the normal map can change seems to be about 70-75 degrees at the most (taylor probably knows because he made the shaders), and that in itself isn't too much for a seam line profile, but if you then make that seam too wide and continuous it'll look like it cuts down a lot.

My advice would be to use about similar contrast, but thinner lines on the height map. Working on high resolution can help that, as it is much easier to make those thin lines (relative to the base map) in higher resolutions. Reducing contrast in this case would probably make the lines wide and mild-angled...
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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Merged the topic about drawing panels to this one due to popular demand and common sense.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline TrashMan

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Part of the problem with the Thunderbolt was the underlying texture..I fixed the normal maps a bit...

Here' - normals and shinemaps for the Falcon and Thunderbolt

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=2c937bcb38ef65c1d2db6fb9a8902bda


EDIT: forgot to put in the fixed diffuse map for the Thunderbolt..here, I'll attach it.

[attachment deleted by ninja]
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