Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: rscaper1070 on January 24, 2011, 06:14:41 pm
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I'm having problems with some asteroids. I thought they would be a good place to start learning how to get stuff in game. Aside from the fact they look like wads of shiny cookie dough the normal maps don't show up until I shoot one and it spawns more. Then the normals only look like they should when you are right next to the asteroid. Farther back and they look all crazy like you can see the wireframe. I baked the maps in Max and then I followed Herra's little tutorial from this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=55854.msg1128583#msg1128583). Also any ideas on how to negate the shine? I thought using a very dark shine map would work but it hasn't.
(http://thumbnails36.imagebam.com/11662/d4254e116615944.jpg) (http://www.imagebam.com/image/d4254e116615944)
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What file format did you save your maps in?
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I used DXT5nm like in the tutorial. I also tried png and tga just to try and see what was going on but they didn't work either.
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Ok, just for kicks, could you open up your map with your editor (or Irfanveiw, or whatever) to ensure that it's the correct Green type?
Also, if your map is larger than 2048^2, you might want to down-size a temporary copy for testing.
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Well they are 1024 and they are gray but the tutorial said that that was to be expected.
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hmm... wonder if the LOD's have anything to do with it? :confused:
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Maybe a link for the normal map DDS in question?
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Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/file/dmo6pg9kk1wvsi5/Ast02-Normal.dds (http://www.mediafire.com/file/dmo6pg9kk1wvsi5/Ast02-Normal.dds)
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Hmm. Where to start.
See, in a real normal map, the data on the GREEN and ALPHA channels, they are for different directions. One is the direction of the vertical, the other the direction for the horizontal. In yours, they are absolutely identical.
Look at any of the ASTEROD*-normal.dds files in the MediaVPs to see what I mean as a direct apples to apples compare.
Or the attachment. It's a quick and dirty conversion using Photoshops nVidia NormalFilter.
[attachment deleted by ninja]
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Strange, I copied the red channel to the alpha and then copied the green channel to the red and blue like Herra said to. There must have been something wrong with what I started out with. Thanks for your help, I'll take a look.
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Wait, you played around with the channels, then saved to DXT5nm?
DXT5nm does the swap automatically, so when you have a blue-purple normal map source, you should either swap channels OR save as DXT5nm, not both.