Spring RTS Engine

your tone was indicative of a defensive one.

I just want to see this fast and good method. All the worthwhile methods I have seen required 2x the work at least.

Snipawolf wrote:

smoth wrote:Oh mr d, prove me wrong, take the t61(a low poly unit) and make the proper normal map for it and I will openly admit I was wrong. However, I doubt that it is as quick as you think.

Heh, that sounds like an all day job to me >___>

You're a serious optimist. More like all-week.

Well, I usually mod on weekends, but I get two to three hours a day of spare time due to football and school...

So, by one day, I meant one whole saturday or sunday, somewheres upwards of at least 16 hours, possibly more.

It doesn't have to be an excessive ammount of work, not if you don't make it too insane on the details.

In max I can just make an outline object and subdivide most of it to get that rounded and smoothing on that object that will make the normal map with very soft edges, extra details like seams, bolts, open panels, and exposed engine parts ect and all that other stuff can indeed take time.

But like I was saying, if you have a very well made texture, you can get tools that can pull a pretty good normal map right out of that main texture if you want, the results may not be as nice as doing an actual geometry map, but it will be close enough for its purpose, which is adding more detail to a very low poly model.

And I do agree that it can be easier to build the high poly normal mapping model first, then doing the lower poly cage model.

Not adding all the extra details completely defeats the point of the normalmap.

There's a photoshop filter from nvidia to generate normal maps.

From heightmaps!

Mods like the LEGO mod could really really benefit from using normal maps.

KDR_11k wrote:From heightmaps!

Probably. No idea how good the results are.

Link

While I do think Normal maps would be a good improvement, it would make developing a lot harder.

And, in the case of smoth -> A godlike unit would require a godlike normal map.

yeah the auto normal map tools are fail.. let me think of an analogy... ah yes.. that rancid whore in your town.. we all have one in our town I am sure you do as well...

she will sleep with everyone who would sleep with her she doesn't look the best has kids or maybe less teeth then normal. She will have vd..

or the worthwhile girl who you can have a family with.

as far as I am concerned the auto tools are the rancid whore. They do not and could not understand that different shades are NOT elevations. It would treat darker areas of cammo as depressions and it assumes 1 direction for the lighting(because a normal map is really just different lights on each channel) that one direction will not work out as the damn texture map is not all aligned one way.. oh and god help you if you have exposed metalic edges...

The only way to KINDA use that tool is to draw the height field for the model... that could take longer then adding some polygonal details... which still will add at least 2X the time.

I may be tired, in a foul mood and general exasted to the point where my vision is blurry but you fail to show me a method that would make this sort of thing feasible to the teams on this forum.

Hi, personally, i'd really like to see normal map support in Spring. :)

As its supposed to be an added feature rather than as a replacement for the good old fashioned style textures, I see it as a good opportunity for the aspiring artists here to add another skillset to their repetoire, as well as a nice graphical enhancement for Spring.

As the Spring engine already has a pretty good lighting setup (except that the grass & trees are still unshaded, the last time I played it anyway), I think normal maps will be a good complement to it.

If anyone is skeptical about whether normal maps are a good idea, i'll be happy to make a short demo reel demonstrating the capabilities of normal mapping when put together with dynamic lighting. Just ask nicely and i'll see it done after my exams are over.

Doing a simple normalmap from a 2D heightmap is not hard, nor particularly time-consuming, imo. I could do simple normalmaps for everything in PURE pretty quick, I think. And even such a simple normalmap is going to add a lot of perceived detail to a model.

Doing a normalmap from a 3D mesh with subdivisions, however, pretty much requires Maya or Lightwave and various other very expensive and proprietary tools at the moment. The problem there is that subdivision modeling without merely doing a smoothing step, and with 1:1 preservation of the uvmap, pretty much requires that we use zBrush, which is not a free tool.

Use Blender. Also you don't preserve the UV map, that's what the raycasting is for.