[TrashMan]

Uploaded on freespacemods.

I included 2 versions (different weapon setup)

The normal map problem is fixed (Thanks Herra ). Also included is a new shinemap.

EDIT: v.14 uploaded

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Cobra]

Link and screenshots, please?

[Droid803]

http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.372


Screenshot is on that page.

[Cobra]

Yeah but it'd be nice not to have to hunt for the Perseus on FSMods.

[Admiral_Stones]

IMO it's more brownish in color. Or is that the 'too dark LOD1' problem?

[Snail]

TrashMan's version of the Perseus Advanced is supposed to be darker.

[ShadowGorrath]

Missed it. Guess I'll have to download tomorrow. . .

[Herra Tohtori]

Like you said, there's a problem in the normal map - it's incorrectly composed, since all channels have same information, which results in the normals being adjusted wrongly in either U or V -axis direction. It might be partially responsible for the darkening effect as well. Also, there's some heavy artefacting on the texture (same with other maps as well, but it becomes pronounced on normal maps); what DDS converter do you use and with which settings?

Also, the shinemap lacks an alpha channel, which means full mirror env mapping (that's easy to fix though), and there's no real reason for it to be gray since there are coloured parts on the ship. Blue parts should have bluish reflection, and that means being blue on the shinemap... if anything, I've found that shinemaps benefit from increased saturation instead of being made grayscale.

If you need help on how to add normal map details to the mediaVP Perseus normal map's lower area without affecting the upper area (which works pretty well on the Perseus and should work on this as well), I can help with that.


As far as the model goes, it looks a bit excessively smoothed, but I am no modeler; it just looks a bit... blubbery when you disable diffuse, shine, glow and normal maps. The smoothing on the MediaVP Perseus is far less intensive, it actually looks kinda faceted without the textures but it doesn't really matter

[TrashMan]

I never really cared much for enviroment mapping, so that's why my shinemap has no alpha channel.

Up untill my CrayBump demo was still working, I'd make a height map by hand and then use CrazyBump to generate a normal map out of it.
For the Perseus Advanced, I took the perseus normal map and cut and pasted bits to the bottom, so no wonder it ended up screwy.

As for the smoothing...strange. PCS2 must have done that since the only thing I ported to max and edited there were the gun pods and the upper engine pod. Everything else was done in TS and I haven't changed any shading or smoothing parameters.

[Colonol Dekker]

You tried the Photosho NViddia normal tools?

They're quite good

[TrashMan]

As a rule of thumb I let Crazy bump make a .tga, and then I use Photoshop (Got a NVidia 8800GTC card and Nvidia tools installed) to convert to DTX1 (diffuse, shine) or DTX5 NM (normal).

[Herra Tohtori]

I never really cared much for enviroment mapping, so that's why my shinemap has no alpha channel.

Well... if you don't want any env mapping, just put in a black alpha channel. It is not a big thing to do, and the resulting shinemap will be compatible with environment mapping and won't force anyone who uses envmapping to either edit the file themselves or just abandon using your models for lack of knowledge.

With a black alpha channel, the shinemap will only have specular effects, just as if envmapping was turned off. Personally I don't really think the current environmental mapping works well at all for anything but glass and chrome, so I prefer ships' hulls to have black alpha channel, but it works reasonably well for cockpit glass and makes a lot more realistic glass panel effect on non-transparent surfaces (like making windows on main hull of a ship) than just the alpha channel.

Up untill my CrayBump demo was still working, I'd make a height map by hand and then use CrazyBump to generate a normal map out of it.
For the Perseus Advanced, I took the perseus normal map and cut and pasted bits to the bottom, so no wonder it ended up screwy.

[second post]

As a rule of thumb I let Crazy bump make a .tga, and then I use Photoshop (Got a NVidia 8800GTC card and Nvidia tools installed) to convert to DTX1 (diffuse, shine) or DTX5 NM (normal).

How did you save this normal map file then? It appears to me that you (or the saving process to dxt5nm) pasted either red or green channel to all channels, because each channel is the same... Also, I personally never liked Crazybump; I feel that a normal map plugin offers me more control over the end result, but some say CB works well enough, so I guess it's mainly a matter of preference.

Pasting stuff onto empty area of a normal map should work, as long as the neutral colour is the same in both maps; "darker" or "brighter" values will cause the whole ship's surface normals to tilt slightly from the model normals, which makes flat surfaces look like angled based on lighting...). However I would suggest you do the channel shifting (red->alpha, green->red&blue, or you can alternatively leave red and blue channels black) manually in that case, since if you rely on DDS plugin to do that while you save the normalmap to dxt5nm, and then paste that file's top mipmap layer to the Perseus map's mipmap layer and save THAT file (which is already in DDS format) again into dxt5nm file, the artefacts cumulate pretty fast especially if the plugin doesn't allow quality controls and stuff.

[TrashMan]

I'll take your advice on shipemaps with black alpha for eviroment (except windows).


I literally copy pasted bits of the normal map (without touching the layers), so assumed the RGB layers would remain unafected. I'm still not entirely sure what I did wrong.

Hmmm...someone mentioned another tool for manking normal maps beside Crazy Bump?

[Herra Tohtori]

I literally copy pasted bits of the normal map (without touching the layers), so assumed the RGB layers would remain unafected. I'm still not entirely sure what I did wrong.

Hmm... If you open a dxt5nm file and re-save it to dxt5nm again, what happens to the channels?

As far as I know it, the dxt5nm file is basically just a dxt5 file where red channel information is transferred to alpha channel, and red and blue channels are either black or the green channel is pasted to both red and blue (so the colour channels are the same, and alpha channel different). Now when you have this kind of situation and re-save it to dxt5nm, the saving mechanism again moves the red channel to alpha, which is NOT what you want to have there.

Or, as follows:

Normalmap's RGBA converts to DXT5nm GGGR (first channel is moved to last, and second is copied to first three)
When re-saving an already channel-managed DXT5nm's (GGGR), it converts to frakked up DXT5nm GGGG where each channel now has the originally green channel information.

You can paste stuff but if the channels are already properly managed, save as standard dxt5 instead of the normalmap variant. That should solve that issue.

This is, incidentally, one of the reasons I prefer to manage the channel swapping manually. It prevents mix-ups like this quite effectively when you know all the time where you're going at.

Hmmm...someone mentioned another tool for manking normal maps beside Crazy Bump?

I can vouch for GIMP's normalmap plugin, it's pretty good one, with a good range of settings (depth, filtering etc. etc.). Photoshop's normalmap plugin most likely offers at least the same functionality but I'm not a photoshopper so you'd need to ask about that from someone else.

The main difference with CB and normalmap plugins is that you will need to make several layers of the height map depending on how much different strengths of normal details you want on the map; for example you wouldn't want scratches or other surface detail to be quite as strongly normalmapped as seamlines and actual geometry details like machinery and stuff. But in the end of the day I find it better and quite natural to use. CrazyBump offers some kind of tools to adjust differently sized details of the height map to be mapped with different strengths on the normalmap, but I only ever used the free demo and it felt cumbersome and not quite as accurate as you get with manual processing from the start.

[Water]

Hmmm...someone mentioned another tool for manking normal maps beside Crazy Bump?

http://www.xnormal.net/2.aspx It's only 60 Mb. Under the tools section is the heightmap to normal map section. For the swizzle part make sure it is -Y

The Compressionator by ATI/AMD works well for converting a normal map to dds. After hitting compress choose DXT5 xGxR. The map will turn out green as it doesn't save any info to the red and blue channels.

[Herra Tohtori]

...DXT5 xGxR. The map will turn out green as it doesn't save any info to the red and blue channels.

Does that make any difference in filesize at all, compared to GGGR?

[TrashMan]

So basicely, to fix the nomal map of the Perseus Advanced, all I need to do is open the stock Perseus normal map, cut and paste bits again and save, but as normal DTX5 this time?

[Herra Tohtori]

So basicely, to fix the nomal map of the Perseus Advanced, all I need to do is open the stock Beta MediaVP Perseus normal map, cut and paste bits again and save, but as normal DTX5 this time?

Essentially, yes... but be mindful of those compression artefacts, normal maps are more sensitive to them than diffuse or shinemaps since each artefact will change the normal of the surface instead of just colouring it. If you're getting too much artefacts, look at alternative DDS utilities like NVidia's nvDXT -command line tool, or the already mentioned ATi Compressionator. Your GPU shouldn't matter, these both should work just on the CPU.

NVidia does have newer stuff with CUDA support that can utilize GPU processing power, though. Haven't really looked into it yet.

[TrashMan]

Fixored

[Akalabeth Angel]

I never really cared much for enviroment mapping, so that's why my shinemap has no alpha channel.

     I don't know why anyone would care for environment mapping myself either. Playing Earth Defense it was like the ships were battling in a disco hall with all the stars reflected all over the hull. It was retarded.