Remake HL textures

[DaanO]

Humpf, generating bumpmaps from heightmaps in Photoshop never worked for me, would you mind giving a few directions? (Oh and i have read tutorials but it. just. doesn't. work. ack)

[kleinluka]

Just did a quick normal map for that in PS. Normally I'd go in and model the shape of the monitor to be a bit concave and other rounded shapes like the thing in the bottom right but this was just for quick show that its possible to do most of that stuff in PS very quickly.

Diffuse:

Grayscale for Normal conversion:

Normalmap:

[Term]

Hey that looks awesome already, especially considering you didn't have access to the source file at all! I did a quick shot of it in the halfassed engine I recently worked with, but the rendering quality of the engine is subpar (to say the least):

It would be cool if someone could make a screenshot in a more decent rendering system, currently I don't have many games installed on my system and have to stick with this older engine.

I'll have my go at the normal map later today, now I first need to have my cereals and stuff (Daniel, soll ich ein Nutella-Brötchen auf Dein Wohl mitessen oder gibt's das Zeug inzwischen auch in Übersee? ).

[Zacker]

That texture looks cool and so does the normal map for it:) It does however really beg for a higher res.

Lol @ the Nutella-Brötchen, don't they have such stuff in Montreal?

[Pericolos0]

that looks excellent

its a pity it's so blurry though

the peeling paint bits are also way too deep

[InsaneSingingBlender]

very nice

doom 3 is teh best engine

[Term]

@Zacker: Not sure about Canada, but I know a lot of people in the US who smuggle a couple glasses overseas everytime they visit Europe

@ISB: Do I read it right that you suspect this to be the D3 engine? Unfortunately it's not :roll: I can't talk about the engine (NDA yadda yadda...), but trust me you wouldn't want to work with it.

Ok, I'm done with my normal mapped version. As a test I used the ATI Normal Map Generator instead of the Photoshop-Plugin from nVidia (which I used before), the resulting normal map seems a tad bit crispier to me:

Grayscale:

Normalmap:

Ingame:

The end result doesn't look that different from Kleinluka's, though. Very nice work, dude! :wink:

[kleinluka]

Nutella gibbets hier auch

Thats a nice normal, see you added the nice concave crap that i didnt bother doing. For some reason the nvidia plugin doesnt do gradients, I'll have to check out the Ati plugin.

good work, looks nice.

[Term]

Yes, my gradients with the nVidia plugin always looked poop, that's why I tried ATIs solution to it (I only heard good things about it). It's a bit hard to find on their site, so here's a link. Note that they don't sport a PS plugin though, it's a standalone app which makes it a bit more time-consuming to use.

[sensee]

Does the ATI Normalmapper only work with models?!

I don't get it

[Term]

No, there' a 3DSMax plugin on their site, but this application works with grayscale images (just like the plugin from nVidia). You save your grayscale heightmap as a TGA in Photoshop, open the app and direct it to it. It then generates the according normal map and saves it by adding "dot3" to the filename.

Unfortunately the ATI program has absolutely no options to tweak the outcome (which the nVidia plugin has plenty of), but most results were satisfying enough for me so I don't need tweaking options anyway. For the hardcore, it's possible to tweak settings in the included "TGAtoDOT3.cpp", but I can't figure out much of what the file includes

[sensee]

Oh you gave the wrong link. Here you find the ATI Normalmap Generator: http://www.ati.com/developer/sdk/Radeon ... erator.zip

I tried to make some normalmaps with the ATI tool and also with the Nvidia tool to compare them. I can see no difference between them, beside that you can change the setting of the Nvidia tool more easily.

What was it that the Nvidia tool couldn't handle?

[Term]

Oops, sorry for screwing up the link.

What the nVidia tool doesn't handle quite as good as the one from ATI is IMO gradients of larger scale (i.e. for things like the concave monitor in my texture).

I dunno, it might be possible to come up with identical normalmaps from both the ATI and nVidia tool - but not with the default setings of the plugin. ATI normalmaps just seem to be right "out of the box" without much fiddling with settings. But to each his own.

[sensee]

I made a couple of test and I draw the conclusion that the nVidia tools are better.

You're right. If you use the "Biased RGB" setting then it kinda screws up the gradients. You need to set it on "Average RGB" for best results.

If you set the filter type on "4 sample" and the scale about 5 you should get about the same results as the ATI tool.

If you need rougher normalmap shapes, you just set a higher filter type and if you need more depth, you just increase the filter size. That's all you need to know to handle the nVidia tool. Because of these possibilities, I find it the better tool.

By the way, very nice texture you made ^^

[kleinluka]

The nvidia tools disregard gradients completely. Try making a 256² texture that is simply a black/white gradient and converting that into a normal map. It simpyl outputs as flat blue.

Wish Ati would make a tool that is more easy to use in Photoshop.

But honestly, if you create a few basic modelds for shapes you use a lot in textures you can create a folder with these normal maps and re-use them for a lot of stuff with only minor tweaking.

And it's always fast to make a quick model and render that into a normal map. At least for basic stuff like that monitor screen.

BTW @ TERM

How come your grayscale map is inverted but the normal map is not? It's supposed to be WHITE=UP, BLACK=DOWN