[Scooby_Doo]

Anything you'll see on a fighter will probably look cartoonish at best.

[BlackDove]

The 3.6.10 media vp's disagree with you.

[Scooby_Doo]

most look good, with a few exceptions...
Ulyesses - looks like turtle armour
loki - looks good, minus the dented up surfaces
myrimdin - hard to tell, normal mapping is buried in black 
hygeia - semi round, not enough to complain

the rest look great, just those that have huge black gaps between their armour plating.  Nothing can be done about that really, because there's no real easy way to clean them up.

 

[Ransom]

Man, are you serious? The Loki's perfect.

[Scooby_Doo]

Oh it looks good, minus the fact it's made out of rock..

The Zeus looks the best so far. 

edit: ok the Hasp. looks the best, but thats a capship 

btw is there a problem with the Ravana?  When I switch to no diffuse mapping, I get odd lighting issues, like the light is coming from the wrong place.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Using normal maps as you are now you won't achieve good results - let alone efficient ones. You've said yourself that some of the MVP fighters look good with their strong normal maps, which tends to go against the 'will probably look cartoonish at best' comment.

The point is that normal mapping on fighter sized stuff needs to be strong and make a big difference, or not be there at all. Outside of renders, there's no point to a subtle normal map, because no-one will notice its effects aside from the performance drain with normal mapping turned on. Remember that storing a normal map is a much bigger performance drain than a much larger polycount!

[Scooby_Doo]

One question, does normal mapping only show when in lod 0?  If so performance hits should be rather low.

[Herra Tohtori]

I guess that depends on whether the lower LODs use the same texture as the highest one...?

[Scooby_Doo]

I though I read somewhere where shine maps aren't used in lower lods.

[Herra Tohtori]

Right. Well, empirically it seems that the two highest LOD's (LOD0, LOD1) use shine and normal and height maps (if present) and the lower LOD's don't.

[Scooby_Doo]

Even with lod 1, that should still be close up, hence only during flybys or close quarter combat should they kick in.  Also don't use smart bumpmaps (ones with 128,128,128 background), instead use pure white background, you'll get a strong normal map right off the bat.

[Herra Tohtori]

Even with lod 1, that should still be close up, hence only during flybys or close quarter combat should they kick in.  Also don't use smart bumpmaps (ones with 128,128,128 background), instead use pure white background, you'll get a strong normal map right off the bat.

Well... That works only if you don't want to have any extrusions on the normal/height map. #808080 colour is good in the regard that it allows both indentations and extrusions - brighter is higher, darker is lower ground. What comes to actual strength of the normal map - the actual height information is not present any more in the normal map. It only tells what the slope of the surface is at the UV map's point, so the range of the elevation differences doesn't truly matter. What matters is the sharpness/blurryness of the details on the height map from which the normal is generated. The perceived elevation difference will be the result of the apparent slope angle of the surface and the slope's "length", so to speak.

For example, if the normal map tells the engine that on some location you have ten pixels of 45-degree rising slope from the nominal level, then it appears to the viewer that the elevated part will appear to be about ten pixels higher than the nominal level. Similarly, if the angle of the surface in the normal map is, say, 80 degrees from normal, then the perceived elevation difference will be about 57 pixels worth... And if the height map isn't similarly aligned in terms of elevation difference, then things will look rather stupid when the angled edge of the panel seems to point to the elevated portion being higher or lower than the height map -generated parallax shift makes apparent. Having the increasing elevation on the actual sloped area of the height and normal maps to match is another can of worms...

The height map itself does, of course, have some limits on how much it can mimic the elevation differences, but it seems to me that it's balanced so that having pure white "upper" ground and pure black "lower" ground would result in a not-very-good looking end result.

[fsphiladelphia]

The maps that have been posted in this thread since about Halloween all made their way into the 3.6.10 mediavp beta release, right?

[castor]

Yea? Well, methinks that FS wiki needs a new section -- a D/L link page for the various normal maps that are available for each kind of ship

[bkd86]

I'm starting to worry about that rocky texture effect when I start normalling my cap ships. 

That's because your generating your normal map from a texture and when you start changing the contrast and sharpness you get that grainy texture. If you just want to paint on a normal map just do a black and white image with black being down, white up and paint in your panel lines and whatever greebling you want. When you convert it using crazybump or whatever program you won't have the base grain. OR you could take your low poly model and build up a very high poly one off of it and use xNormal to bake the normal map (or whatever program you want 3ds max etc). 

[DaBrain]

*cough* *cough*


Well now... come on!

I'd like to see some more maps I can put into the MediaVPs.

[Kaine]

indeed, this thread should be jumping!

[Herra Tohtori]

Which ones are still free for taking?

[DaBrain]

Well, that is in constant flow...

Everything that isn't in the 3.6.10 Beta has a good chance of still beeing free, but you could just ask for one and it will be reserved for you.


I'll work on Cargo07 now.

[Galemp]

we need moar normal maps!



Download capital03-01a (now working!)