Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > Modding Tutorials

normal maps....HOW?

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--Steve-O--:
is there a plug in for GIMPshop that will do this? if not is there a free program that will use plug ins to do this? and if not.... how do you do them by hand, using GIMPshop with no plugins?

now for some other questions. what exactly do normal maps do? i know at least from what i've seen, they add details that looks like geometry greeble in some type of bump mapping. do they also eliminate the need for shine maps and environment maps by being like the multi use map?
i was just playing the Earth Defense demo and it looks awsome with the mapping and such, so it kinda kicked off my need to figure out what i need to do to get my things to look that good in game.

Herra Tohtori:
GIMP Normal map plugin

Works fine on normal GIMP. Dunno about GIMPShop, but AFAIK it *should* work...

That will make a normal map out of bump (elevation) map. It has a pretty good array of options, too (IMHO).

However, you will still need to convert the normal map to DXT5nm (DDS) format for it to work in FS2_Open. This you can do with the NVidia DDS tools.


As to what the normal maps do... AFAIK they pretty much add specular per-pixel lighting (for main light sources, ie. suns) to the graphics, and the information on the normal map... well, changes the normal of that particualr piece of the model's surface, which results in light being reflected to different direction than a flat vertex would. Which is interpreted as intrusions and dents on the surface by us humans.

Height maps add to the illusion by adding a parallax shift between "low" and "high" portions of the surface as the model turns on the view.

Water:
You have a few options.
xNormal and Crazybump are two other programs that can create normal maps.

Either by creating a greyscale map or by going the hi poly -> lo poly method.

http://www.xnormal.net/
http://www.crazybump.com/

--Steve-O--:

--- Quote from: Herra Tohtori on February 02, 2008, 02:15:59 pm ---
As to what the normal maps do... AFAIK they pretty much add specular per-pixel lighting (for main light sources, ie. suns) to the graphics, and the information on the normal map... well, changes the normal of that particualr piece of the model's surface, which results in light being reflected to different direction than a flat vertex would. Which is interpreted as intrusions and dents on the surface by us humans.

Height maps add to the illusion by adding a parallax shift between "low" and "high" portions of the surface as the model turns on the view.

--- End quote ---

ahh...trickery never looked so good until now. it still amazes me to see how far this game engine has evolved from the day i first played FS and FS2 when they first came out.

i'm playing with crazy bump now, and liking it very much. its easy to use, though it has a bit of a superiority complex. puny humans... :doubt: im sure i can download a therapist plug-in to help it work through those issues. now is it required that all maps be converted to grey scale before feeding it to crazy bump? or can one just open up the diffuse DDS map, have the program generate a normal map from it and then call it done?

Water:

--- Quote from: --Steve-O-- on February 03, 2008, 11:51:58 am ---now is it required that all maps be converted to grey scale before feeding it to crazy bump? or can one just open up the diffuse DDS map, have the program generate a normal map from it and then call it done?

--- End quote ---
You can use the difuse map, but all the texture noise also gets bumped.
As an experiment - feed Crazybump an image with some overlapping squares (different colours/grey)- make sure some of them have a glow around them. Then look at the output - green from one direction, red from the other. As the surface changes you get a green area, when it changes again you lose green etc.

You may notice everything ends up with the same depth - only the strength of the change of "height" shows up. Normal maps don't do depth.

The MVP normal maps look stronger for game use compared to say a normal map for a model render.

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