Author Topic: About normal maps  (Read 18045 times)

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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Draw the blue (or whatever) stuff on a layer, find Hue-Saturation-Lightness (or something equivalent to that in Photoshop), adjust saturation to zero and lightness to either dim or bright, depending on which one you want the colour to be on the elevation map.

However, an edge will only give you a raised (or recessed) edge of a panel, with the middle being at the same level as the surrounding area. If you want a full, raised panel, you'll have to make a solid bright area on a darker surrounding.
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
so then for sake of argument, the panel edges need to be light gray and the panel face needs to be white?

 

Offline Galemp

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Making flat, raised panels, eh? Here's what I would do, in your situation.

First make a layer in solid medium gray, then put it underneath your UV map layer that outlines the model. Make a new layer for the raised panels. Grab your polygonal lasso tool and make a selection the size you want. Then fill it white, at about 20% opacity. If you want it to be higher, increase the opacity so it's a lighter shade of gray. Do this for all your panels. If you want more panels on top of the original ones (for a ziggurat effect) lasso again and fill again in 20% white.

Now, invert the colors on the UV map (so it's now white instead of black.) Make a new layer for the seams and details. Grab your paintbrush tool in black at about 20% opacity again, and trace the lines you want to be engraved into the panel. Again, the greater the opacity, the deeper the grooves. When it's all done turn off the UV map layer, leaving your shading on a gray background.

You can also invert these to make inset panels, or raised ridges, on your model, by darkening or lightening panels or lines. Think of your heightmap as a topographic map, where medium gray is the base level, white is the highest area and black is the lowest. If you were to make a height map for the planet Earth, it would look like this. See how the mountains are white, the plains are gray, and the oceans are black?


The height map's all you really need, as Photoshop's plugin will generate a normal map from it for you.
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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
This works just as well (and probably better).



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« Last Edit: August 29, 2008, 01:46:16 pm by Herra Tohtori »
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Offline Galemp

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
That's OK, you've illustrated. :)

hmm, someone ought to sticky this and merge in other threads related to normal mapping, including the one in the SWTC forum. In particular this StarWing is a great example of how to use normal maps effectively.
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
ok just so i understand this, what i'm doing is creating white panels on top of the UV map, then invert the UV map colors and edge the panels in black... then get rid of the UV map layer and use the normal plugin, correct?

 

Offline Galemp

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Right. The UV map layer is only there to guide you. I suggested inverting the colors so you can see what you're doing, and not drawing black lines on a black background. You could recolor the UV map fluorescent pink and chartreuse if you wanted.

You probably don't want to edge the panels in black unless you want a 'moat' around the panels. Remember, it's like a topo map. Whenever you lighten it you're adding height, and whenever you darken you're dropping the height.
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
right ok, but doing it in black @20% opec isn't black, correct?

 
Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
i must be doing something wrong... here's what i came up with



now when i inverted the UV map layer 2 (my pannels i drew) vanished, so i inverted layer 2 so i could do layer 3... then i inverted it back before i turned off the UV map.

In the 3d preview i see nothing but a big gray square on all of the layers except layer *3... there i see white outlines of the panels but thats it.
« Last Edit: August 29, 2008, 03:00:59 pm by Vertigo 7 »

 

Offline TrashMan

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another one:

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
what file format do i need to be saving these normal maps as? the nvidia plugin gives me a bajillion options

 
Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
what file format do i need to be saving these normal maps as? the nvidia plugin gives me a bajillion options

DTX5_nm
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
my brain is turning to mush at this point... once i create a normal map i can go back to the UV map and start the process all over again to give texture details to the model, such as color and such, right?

for FS's way of doing things, i need to use like port-wing.dds for the base texture, and port-wing_normal.dds for the normal map name?

 
Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
my brain is turning to mush at this point... once i create a normal map i can go back to the UV map and start the process all over again to give texture details to the model, such as color and such, right?

for FS's way of doing things, i need to use like port-wing.dds for the base texture, and port-wing_normal.dds for the normal map name?

Usually I add the details first, then do the bump map (for normal map creation).

Texturing details (like colors, warning stickers...etc) would go in the texture file (in this case port-wing.dds)
Glowing stuff (glowmaps) would go in port-wing-glow.dds
shine in port-wing-shine.dds
and
normal map would go in port-wing-normal.dds

Although I've never used the minus key as part of the "base" filename.  It should still work, if they coded it correctly.
That's cool and ....disturbing at the same time o_o  - Vasudan Admiral

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Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
what file format do i need to be saving these normal maps as? the nvidia plugin gives me a bajillion options

DTX5_nm


Actually it's not that simple... DXT5nm file is simply a DXT5 file where the red channel of the normal map is moved to alpha channel, and green channel is copied to red and blue channels.

It's possible to manually move the channels to their appropriate place and save the file as regular DXT5 (which will in fact be identical to a DXT5nm file due to channel management) - OR, and this is where it gets interesting, you can save the file as uncompressed u8888 DDS file, which can sometimes be advantageous if you want to prevent any compression artefacts (especially if your normal map has a lot of diagonal panel lines and other stuff that suffers from aliasing effects easily). Handy for taking screenshots at very close distance to surface... in some cases anyways.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2008, 02:55:57 am by Herra Tohtori »
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Offline Water

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?

Actually it's not that simple...
Umm dude...  Sometimes too much info can be as bad as too little for a beginner. *Overload* 

 

Offline Harbinger of DOOM

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That Thunderbolt is lookin sexeh.

Care to post those normal maps for download?
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Offline chief1983

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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
Normally I'd agree, but this guy's been like a sponge with everything everyone has thrown at him so far.  And I just wanted to thank everyone who has made detailed, informative posts in this thread, there's a lot of gold in here now.  It should definitely be copied somewhere and stickied or something.
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Offline chief1983

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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.
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Re: drawing panels -> normal maps?
yeah i'm not trying to sound too self righteous or what not but chief is right. I'm trying to learn this mess asap to make this starwing look good... Lucasarts aint gonna have nothin on me =p I think i decided the best course of action is to just do the panels in varying shades of color for now on a defuse map and once im done with that go back and do the normal from there. Does anyone have a recommendation for a rendering program that can pull all of the maps in at once... like fs2 does =p?