[gevatter Lars]

ok will see that I can take a look at it as soon as I find some time.

[Scooby_Doo]

Well I think I've made some progress, a light bulb in my head went off last night.

It looks like there is no direct normal map support in max 7. maybe in max 8 or 9? Bump map normal maps lower the texture, displacement normal maps raises the texture...

Since bumpmapping is in the possible future... how about displacement mapping too? They complement each other.

not sure why the displacement is so low res compared to the bumpmap.

[DaBrain]

I don't think we should use more than one technique for now.

Also... bumpmapping is outdated and afaik, there is no 'real' displacement mapping for games. It's just some advanced techniques, that use normal maps, but go beyond the standard normal mapping.

But, those will for sure require 'clean' normal maps. Not just like the cheapo way I've been doing them in so far.

Remapping all FS2 ships/objects, anyone? Certainly not me.

[Scooby_Doo]

Displacement is probably inversed bumpmap, shadowed areas are now highlighted and visa versa.

Still not fond of normal mapping, if i can't preview it done right in Max.

[DaBrain]

Displacement is probably inversed bumpmap

No, it works different. You could create a small fake landscape with displacement mapping, but not with bump mapping.

Still not fond of normal mapping, if i can't preview it done right in Max.

Works fine for me...


I really think it's a setup problem.

[Scooby_Doo]

Ok how did you do that? I've gone through i don't know how many online "tutorials" and haven't gotten me anywheres....
It usually how to setup normal mapping for real time rendering, which i can't do because it requires shaders.

[DaBrain]

Ah... you can't use shaders?

So that's the problem. (Did I miss that?) Well... this is the viewport. It looks different when I render it.

I prefer the real-time version, cause it's interactive. I wouldn't touch normal maps without a gfx card that doesn't support D3D9 shaders.
It's just too difficult to test what you just did.

[Scooby_Doo]

Well hopefuly soon I'll get something that has shader support... i heard theres a radeon 1600 or 1800 on sale BF

Well the only way I get any good results is using bump then normal map mode and select the normal map file.
course i could have just as well done that with regular old bumpmapping.

edit:ehhhh.. i think i have something that looks like a normal map rendered... but i see no advantage over bumpmap... in fact it doesn't even do outward displacement like displacement mapping does.

[DaBrain]

Well.. normal mapping isn't displacement mapping. Although some of the newer techniques can have similar results. Actually even better results than displacement mapping.

With normal mapping, you can make a low-poly mesh look like a high-poly mesh. You can hardly say the same about bump mapping...

[Taristin]

Is there a good tutorial out there that can tell me how to make a normal map? I want to try it on my lizard fighters.

[Mehrpack]

hi,
normal mapping is a variety of bump mapping, like virtually displacement mapping.
they "rebuild" geometry visually, like dabrain said.
the first released game with normal mapping was farcry.
normaly the artist make an high polyon modell (like 500k polygone), then they make a "texture", reducted the polygone and use the texture to rebuilding it.
but the problem is, that you see the low polygone edges of the modeel.


displacement mapping is complettly different.
in the GPU displacement mapping using a high map to modificated the geometry of a modell.
it generated polygones.
so you make an modell with 1000 polygones and a high map, and in the GPU the modell go to 100.000 polygones.
the advantage is that you dont have to save and transmit so an high-polygone modell in the system.

but theres problems: first you generate in the GPU the polygones, but the collision of objects make the CPU.
and in the moment only two graphics cards support real displacement mapping.
the new Geforce 8800 GTS/GTX (like all Direct3D 10 compatible cards) and the old pehelia matrox graphic card.

so in the moment is there no really way to use displacement mapping in FS2, and i think not really a way in the future.
because i believe you have to rewrite the collisioncode complettly or a lot of them.

Mehrpack

[Scooby_Doo]

Course it depends on how much displacement you do.....

Alternatively it would be a lot simplier if you could do an inverse bumpmap... rather than creating "bumps" it's creates "raised" sections. Useful for raised panels...etc.

[DaBrain]

You can do more with a normal map than with a simple bump map.

Also... it's acutally easier to create a high-def normal map than something similar as bum map.

Thanks to the render-to-texture feature, all modern 3d softwares have.
Additionally there are freeware tools (i.e. Nvidia Melody), that can take care of that, if your modelling software doesn't support render-to-texture.



@taylor Some games seem to change some channels to achive better compression. Will we use this?
There is a simple method to detec what kind of normal map is used.
By default the (blue-ish) normmal map has 24-bit. The (green-ish) modified normal maps use an alpha channel and therefore have 32-bit.

I don't know if you can support both of them... Also... we might have to use the alpha channel for something else later...(Height map, Paralax mapping?)

[taylor]

@taylor Some games seem to change some channels to achive better compression. Will we use this?
There is a simple method to detec what kind of normal map is used.
By default the (blue-ish) normmal map has 24-bit. The (green-ish) modified normal maps use an alpha channel and therefore have 32-bit.

I don't know if you can support both of them... Also... we might have to use the alpha channel for something else later...(Height map, Paralax mapping?)

I'll leave it open for now, can't really say yes or no at this point.  But if you want it, then I'll try and code in support for it.  Just be sure to remind me about it later on when the code is getting closer to done.  You'll be getting test builds of it all, so when it gets to the point of working like it's supposed to, just bring this up again and I'll see about adding it.

I'm also looking into adding 3Dc compression support for normal maps since it has better quality for such things than DXT does.

[Scooby_Doo]

Nvidia Melody... that takes a high def model and uses it's normal map on a low def model... I'm definetely not going that route... in fact I doubt very few here will. I'd rather paint up a normal map or create one from a bumpmap.  Also I was reading some forum about Doom 3's addnormal mapping, using normal mapping which gives you vertice normals and bumpmapping which gives you height.

[DaBrain]

Well... it's not that much work to create a "high"-poly model. Just smooth some edge, greeble a bit and use the more detailed model as high-poly mesh. You can add more detail in photoshop by creating a height map for small detail, using the NV plugin and overlay the two normal maps.