The awesome powers of normal mapping

[Alletun]

For my textures, i use a program called CrazyBump. Its pretty good. Never tried it with anything on the TW games yet though.

-EJon

CrazyBump is a very nice program. Havn't tried it myself but i've seen people use it to great effect.

[EpicJon]

Really good, trust me I used it for game textures, and believe me it looks very nice


-EJon

[SigniferOne]

See I don't know how else the normals can look, other than in vanilla MTW2. I want to believe they can produce the effects in the first post, but I'm having a hard time imagining how they could do it. That's why I asked Tchouk to release one unit, to see what makes that difference between vanilla normals and his.

[EpicJon]

Well, maybe the detail of the normal map.


-EJon

[Tchouk]

Sorry I took so long:

The texture.

The normal.

[TWoxy]

Wow... Just, wow.

[AlphaDelta]

There's nothing new about this technique, but it's an interesting tech demo for the Med2 engine.

However, I take my hat off to anyone who produces an entire mod using these high-poly-made normal maps. There is a huge amount of extra work in modelling high poly versions of every mesh in the mod. This coupled with the fact that it's more or less overkill for a strategy game, means that it's unlikely that this technique will get wide-spread use.

Cheers

[Argent Usher]

Just a info each should read this here:

http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map

This site is very very good and has a lot of useful informations.

Check all tut's and links. Especially all tut's of Scott Warren and Ben Mathis (Painting)


Regards A.U.

[Nakharar]

it is very nice shame it takes so long to work

[SigniferOne]

There's nothing new about this technique, but it's an interesting tech demo for the Med2 engine.

However, I take my hat off to anyone who produces an entire mod using these high-poly-made normal maps. There is a huge amount of extra work in modelling high poly versions of every mesh in the mod. This coupled with the fact that it's more or less overkill for a strategy game, means that it's unlikely that this technique will get wide-spread use.

Cheers

Of course you can limit yourself in how much detail you want to put into it. And once you make it, you can use this map for all of the same-looking units. I think it could be quite time effective, actually!

[SigniferOne]

Just a info each should read this here:

http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map

This site is very very good and has a lot of useful informations.

Check all tut's and links. Especially all tut's of Scott Warren and Ben Mathis (Painting)

Excellent, excellent link. There are explanations with simple examples, tutorials on how to get good normals from flat textures, and lots more.



On the left is the normal you get from simply using the nVidia filter. On the right is the normal if you use the nVidia filter intelligently

Resulting difference?

[Argent Usher]

I am pleased to be able to help the community. The tut's are really easy to comprehend for beginners but also useful for pro.

Yesterday i found this one here: http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

Regards A.U.

[Banzai!]

Excellent, excellent link. There are explanations with simple examples, tutorials on how to get good normals from flat textures, and lots more.



On the left is the normal you get from simply using the nVidia filter. On the right is the normal if you use the nVidia filter intelligently

Resulting difference?

Please elaborate.

Also the left picture looks more real compared with the right one.

[Foehammer]

pretty incredible. M2tw peasants (as well as other units) have default low-quality settings for textures and models. you are giving us well-defined and high-quality units.

p.s.: what are you doing recently? are you interesting in *hem* giving a helping hand?

Those are still pretty much Low-quality units. Z-Brush (to my understanding, I'm a 3DS MAX and Silo modeler,) does not change the amount of poly's or tri's said object has, yet it defines the base mesh, so you get what you see, without the high poly count.

I think..

[SigniferOne]

No. All the "3d effects" you see are created solely through the normal map. I mean see the title of this thread. The mesh remains the same, yet the unit looks 5x more detailed. See my above post, with a flat stone wall on the left and a 3d stone wall on the right.

[gogo t]

Hummm did I make it ?

[Ificratis]

Very nice technique especially for some real scary faces

[gogo t]

I fixed it

[Yelü Dashi]

Interesting, I tried the method outlined above with about 9 layers, not the 30 as stated and it didn't a huge impact on the texture.

gogo t - I think faces are best avoided with this method, but your clothing looks pretty good, how many layers of the normalmap did you use ? 30 ?

[gogo t]

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