[Scooby_Doo]

it'll be most visible on capships.

Yes, thats the only thing i was thinking of, but even then....

LOL for some funny reason i don't think background/space needs normal mapping 

[Vasudan Admiral]

Honestly I don't think we'll ever see normal mapping in it's true glory because of games nature.  You're not going to see walls, details  and bad guys up close constantly.

Yeah, you're right. So we compensate by doing exactly what you suggest:

Also the Uyl. is way over normalized.  Theres a huge gap between the panels.

[ION3]

I think the problem is how mipmapping combines with normal mapping. But unless we change the normal mapping shader (at cost of performance) we can`t change it.

The problem is:
if you have two normals \ and / and you make a mipmap the resulting normal is |. And not \/ as it would be in reality. That means ,that from a distance the seams between the armor plates on the ulysses are basically faded out at the distance, so they have to be exaggerated to look right.

Maybe the problem could be solved with a shader with "anisotropic lighting" (i`m not sure whether that word is right).
Or a shader which takes two independant normals as input which represent the two most common average normals of the lower mip levels.

Did anyone notice my post? If i`m wrong please correct me.

[Herra Tohtori]

The width and depth of the seams on Uly isn't really the problem. The problem is that the displacement (or height) map from which the normal was generated has been blurred at some phase, which makes the seamline "cross-section" profile rounded, which makes the edges and corners of the plates rounded rather than sharp.

Which contributes to the silly putty appearance, of course. The plates don't look like they're cut from metal but instead like they're molded out of polyurethane foam or some such stuff, and then painted with metallic colour.

Rounded armour plate edges don't just fit well in Terran engineering style.

This is what I got when I sharpened the height map a bit (and did some other stuff to it to get rid of some of the blurring), then converted it to normal map and increased the contrast of that map so that I ended up with this:




Unfortunately, it seems that when I increased the contrast of the normal map to "angularize" the edges and corners, it also causes the normal and height maps to misalign to some extent, but this is what the Uly looks with this normal map without the height map enabled:




And here's how it looks zoomed out (again, without height map enabled):




Just my thoughts on the matter.

[Topgun]

that looks perfect. how did you do it? with sharpened hight map or without a hightmap?

[Herra Tohtori]

Like I said...

Took the height map from the VP, enlarged it to 2048x4096 to avoid excessive artefacting when changing contrast/brightness; then made the seam edges and corners sharper - essentially, made the transitions from sloped areas to level areas more abrupt intead of slow gradient transition (which ends up in rounded edges). Then applied some selective gaussian blur to get rid of some artefacts that slithered their way to the image. Converted to normal map, increased contrast even more to get the seam lines "V"-shaped instead of some sine wave/gaussian bell curve profile. Resized to 512x1024, which thankfully decreased the artefacting quite a bit at this point, then converted to dxt5nm format.

But like I said, changing the contrast of the normal map excessively does misalign the normal map from the height (bump) map it was made from. Thus it would be preferable to make the height maps more accurate regarding the seam lines and stuff.

[Cobra]

I don't care, give us that Ulysses.

[Herra Tohtori]

That normal map I posted couldn't be used as anything but a placeholder or proof of concept IMHO... First of all, it's generated from a compressed file, regardless how much I've tried to cover the artefacting and stuff. You can see the seam lines have some "dots" on them on numerous occasions, which make for ugly bumps that seem out of place on the model.

Secondly, any image editing magickery can't make the height map as sharp as it could and should be, and thirdly, as I said, the height map can't be really used with this normal map because on the seams, the height map has roughly rectangular indentation to the surface, but the normal map has more of a v-shaped seam profile, and those two end up conflicting each other and changing the apparent geometry of the surface when the angle of view changes (it's hard to describe, but you would understand pretty soon what I mean if you saw it). And, in this case, the height map really is worth having, so... meh.

If you really want, get that normal map PNG file I posted earlier, convert it to dxt5nm and slap it onto your mediavps/maps directory; that should change the normal map at least. I'll leave it to you to deal with the mis-aligned sucky height map then.

Someone* should just make the height map from scratch as far and avoid any blurred tools like the black plague. And when that's done, create the normal map from that height map.


*I could probably give it a shot if I find time, but don't count on it.

[Ransom]

That looks much, much better.

[DaBrain]

Well, it looks somewhat better in the launcher, but imho it does not really look better in a mission. The effect is too faint to notice.

You can do incredible looking stuff on really low-poly models with normal mapping. So we should at least try to make use of it.

I've developed some techniques for normal map generation myself now. It takes about as much time as creating a good specular map now, but that's still way less than to create a high-poly model for it.

I will tweak the Uly normal maps for the final MV release and I hope you will like it.


On a sidenote I'd like to mention that the heightmap is crap. I found a better way of creating them now. It will still be hard to use on terran ships, but it might work very well on vasudan ships.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, it looks somewhat better in the launcher, but imho it does not really look better in a mission. The effect is too faint to notice.

Yeah, most likely. I was just trying to point out the actual problem rather than making a replacement normal map - that it's the shape of the seams instead of their dimensions being the "problem" with the current Ulysses normal map - if you wanna call it a problem in the first place.

I've developed some techniques for normal map generation myself now. It takes about as much time as creating a good specular map now, but that's still way less than to create a high-poly model for it.

I will tweak the Uly normal maps for the final MV release and I hope you will like it.


On a sidenote I'd like to mention that the heightmap is crap. I found a better way of creating them now. It will still be hard to use on terran ships, but it might work very well on vasudan ships.

That's good to hear, I trust much more in thy abilities of making the normal maps something extraordinaire than myself...

[Ransom]

DaBrain, I think you're too focused on this idea that the bump maps should be blatantly obvious. That isn't really what it should be about. Not for the fighters. Using sensible normal maps instead of overdone ones will improve the game's overall composition regardless of whether the player can tell that they are having fancy graphical features shoved in their face at all times.

[Scooby_Doo]

btw what format does heighmaps need to be? DXT1?

[taylor]

btw what format does heighmaps need to be? DXT1?

Yep, DXT1 is best, simply for the reduction in memory consumption.  Technically heightmaps just need to be simple 8-bit images, but I figured that it would be easier for everyone to just use something a little more familiar, plus DXT1 can use a little less memory than a single channel image.

[DaBrain]

DaBrain, I think you're too focused on this idea that the bump maps should be blatantly obvious. That isn't really what it should be about. Not for the fighters. Using sensible normal maps instead of overdone ones will improve the game's overall composition regardless of whether the player can tell that they are having fancy graphical features shoved in their face at all times.

That's not the point. We need to justify the memory use here.
If you cannot see it anyway, you don't have to use memory for it.

I just think we should try to increase the general quality of the normal maps to get there.
My version wasn't that great, I admit that. Lowering the normal scaling isn't a solution either.

We cannot create high-poly models for all ships, so there is no way to get "awesome" normal maps. But it should be possible to get "good" normal maps with some effort.

btw what format does heighmaps need to be? DXT1?

DXT1 or 8:8:8, or simply TGA.

[Scooby_Doo]

btw what format does heighmaps need to be? DXT1?

Yep, DXT1 is best, simply for the reduction in memory consumption.  Technically heightmaps just need to be simple 8-bit images, but I figured that it would be easier for everyone to just use something a little more familiar, plus DXT1 can use a little less memory than a single channel image.

Hmmm I must be doing something wrong then, because when i go into the f3 viewer, disable diffuse,shine,glow and normal and just leave height no details get displayed. 

[Herra Tohtori]

AFAIK, normal map needs to be enabled for the height map to be rendered.

Check the normal map, then test if checking and unchecking the height map has any effect whatsoever.

[Scooby_Doo]

Nope, i'm not seeing any changes what-so-ever.. 

heres the vp: http://scoobydoo.freespacemods.net/Problems/Dagger-01-10-08.rar

[taylor]

AFAIK, normal map needs to be enabled for the height map to be rendered.

Check the normal map, then test if checking and unchecking the height map has any effect whatsoever.

Correct.

It's parallax mapping, not actual height mapping, so the normal map is required.  The height map just provides an extra offset for the normal map, which is what parallax mapping is, basically.  

[Cobra]

I decided to muck around with normal maps, and I gave the Hermes a shot. After about 3 attempts, I get this.





I'm getting the dreaded exaggerated metal issue here, and nothing I do seems to change it. Does it need a height map? Because I don't know how to make those.

On a side note it was more or less a success, it looks like it has more detail and the window and hull doesn't look all one texture anymore.

[EDIT] I also tried normal maps on the Hercules, but I can't seem to get any kind of reaction.