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#1 looks great, excellent for your first normal too, play around with the materials.cs a little more, have a look at the specular settings, looks a little off and the shine makes it look a bit too metallic in my view and would make it look even more realistic as opposed to the flat texture, but great work, keep it up !

#2 Nice! I saw this in your vimeo channel earlier. d(^_^)b

#3 Crazybump, oooh fancy! I've been making my normal maps by hand/eye in greyscale and then just whacking them through the Gimp Normal_map filter.

Nice cobbles, looking good, and it'll be interesting to see what a dramatic change it makes to your World root level.

Just a hint, don't over-do the normaling, it's easy to get carried away with bump evelation but sometimes subtlety is good too! Also making your own specular maps in the alpha channel of a DDS is good too.

#4 CrazyBump is a little expensive if you have a lower end budget ($299.00 USD). There's a cheaper alternative called ShaderMap that seems promising ($19.95).

That is if you don't like the gimp method or actually creating the normal map from baking it in from the higher poly model.

#5 Looks great. Now I hope you can take this advice.

In theory, if you are normal mapping, you shouldnt have (or at least you should minimize) bump patterns in the stones diffuse map (color) otherwise you are just duplicationg the same information. A bump map is already a way to represent the irregularities in the material and that information will be used by the engine to generate light/shadow patterns which we see as bumps.

Let me give you an example. Look at the skin in your arm. Unless you have a really bad scar it shouldnt have any bumps on it, just some spots and the like. Now bite your skin (slightly of course Im not encouraging cannibalism) and now you will see the pattern of your teeth in your skin as a bump. Your teeth have left an impression on your otherwise perfect skin and now you will be able to see the interaction of light and shadows. But your skin color (the diffuse map) hasnt changed, you have just added a bump map (the bite)... of course if you bite too strong then the skin will change to red but that would be a change on the diffuse level...

Bump should be used lightly. I hate games where people try to overuse bumps. On the end everything looks like wet stone as there are specular highlights everywhere.

Luck!
Guimo

#6 @Guimo, thats what I would call a Shamanistic approach to an explanation on bumpmaping.

#7 Looks cool - a little tuning on the specular map, and you're set.

#8 I purchased ShaderMap Pro for $19.95, that's a good deal, and it works very well.

#9 Try this Xnormal works well and its free

from there faq

Quote:Q: How much xNormal costs?

A: Absolutely nothing. It's free for any use, including commercial one. No price and no fees at all. If you like it, please, consider to make a donation to the help us or mention xNormal in your project.

www.xnormal.net/Faq.aspx

#10 yes ShaderMap Pro is cheaper and can make the same quality as the other program i am using ShaderMap Pro as well even though have not used it yet besides tests. i don't think i will use ShaderMap Pro for all my normal maps as a character model i think i rather do by hand in gimp. it is so i can mess with it how ever much i want to get the perfect look. everything else i rather just stick with ShaderMap Pro as they look perfect for all the walls and stuff anyway don't need highest quality for that stuff. :P

#11 It's a very nice start. Now, it's time to fine tune your normal. Depending on your diffuse style, you may want to tone down the normals some to avoid the "wet" look. If the diffuse is a very busy texture, over doing the normal will cause it to be even more busy, causing it to look fake and/or an eye soar. In other words, to much of a good thing can kill the feel and look of an area.

Like I said, Great start, and good luck!

~LK~

#12 @Guimo - Diffuse maps SHOULD contain information to describe surface irregularities, just not in the same way. For example, if you have a brushed metal texture with scrapes, the scrapes will not catch or bounce light the same way that the rest of the material would. You would need a lower diffuse on the "imperfections" so that they catch (and absorb) more light than they reflect.

This kind of thing is readily apparent in rusted materials when normal mapped. In general, EVERY map should contain information to describe the surface, just to different degrees and in different ways. Diffuse is not simply the hue or color of the object, it's the amount and type of light absorbed or reflected regardless of viewing angle.


I think the purpose of your post was to point out that Dan Boudreau's texture was off, and I agree. I just think that your reply was kind of a blanket statement.

I also agree that specular maps need a lot of hand holding and a lot of restraint to look good.

I'm looking forward to purchasing TGEA soon too! These things are always enticing me to finally pick up a license.

#13 Hi Daniel,

I never said you need to remove all the diffuse information, I just said that if you are using a bump map you need to reduce the creases on the material otherwise you will have too much bump information. Alternatively you can reduce the normal information in the bump and avoid making it too extreme and/or reduce the reflection in the specularity map.

Of course bump will never be used to simulate rust in a metal or freckles in the skin and thats why we use diffuse maps. But if you have some kind of blister in the paint you can do it with a bump map. Also, if you want more realism, the reflection can be adjusted using a specular map.

All I try to say is bump mapping is a sutile thing that should help but shouldnt become the main quality. There are a lot of games that try to show off the bump, so we get many games where you can see stones which look always wet or tree bark that shines just because the guy in charge thought that if you get a bump map then you must clearly see the bumps and to do so you need to increase specularity so you get a clear bump but with irreal results.

Luck!
Guimo

#14 Hey dan, using photoshop's nvidia plug in for normals, and playing around with the spec settings in materials.cs i got this


its in a portalled dif not using torques ambient lighting, because its awful... its using lighting exported with the dif, wanted a very slightly wet look to it, but to me a pic like that shows what torque can do with the basic of effort, parts of that its pulled the shadow from via the normal bump really make it look like its rough and that the scratches etc really are there, adds the extra geometry, and for a screenshot taken within tgea i feel it looks damn close to a photo

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