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Playing around with normal maps


Micket
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Hey Micket did you enable manually the advanced graphics options by setting material quality in the user.cfg ? Otherwise you wont see normals(parrallax) in game. Actually according to Enrique rome is one of the civ which has a good bump.... The celt though...doesn't

Enrique submitted the file he used to bake the bump in the art source.

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I see

Yes, most of the roman textures have this already.
I can't find the file that Enrique baked from though (I would like to take a look), since there are way to many files to just go around blindly.

(b.t.w the texture is up-side-down on this rounded part:

post-15430-0-42108900-1427545350_thumb.p

Celts seems to have some. But the structures doesn't really fit well with a normal map.

I guess I'm not sure what I should be modeling. Adding another animal probably won't really take the graphics to the next level.

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You could try modelling the wonders I made a texture for the gaul wonder if you want there is the pers wonder (gate of all nation) ( Or the athena partenos statue) (Temple of capitoline jupiter)

Look at this file http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/art_source/trunk/art/textures/skins/structural/china/blends

It was for the china mod(forgot to tell you) but it should give you some clues There will be a pers blend file dont know enriques eta on this though.

Lastly for gaul wonder refs.http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19465

Hope it helps.

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Roman set normalmap is not derived from geometry. It was made from the diffuse with a normalmap generator except the roof which was painted by hand by someone on the team (and made a good work I think)

Yes that round roof part seems to be weird mapped.

Micket you're free to improve the normalmap of any set you think you can improve. Also take a look at the seleucid set... it is still unfinished, or buildings like the roman wood dropsite could have an upgrade

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Enrique: But where is that existing heightmap? I tried browsing the SVN, and tried a bunch of files, but I didn't find it.

I'm pretty sure the reason isn't ticket 3119. It's a twofold problem:

1. the rounded part have more geometry, V-shaped patterns, and the heightmap/normalmap is fitted for the flat surface.

2. The UV coordinates are not set correctly on that section (they are upsidedown, but that's not th actually the only problem)

Fixing 2 should be enough to stop it from looking strange: see example here (with just the diffuse map)

post-15430-0-58266800-1427556521_thumb.p

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Actually guys. exactly which file is it: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser#art_source/trunk/art/textures/skins/structural/romans

I can't find it. Should I even be looking here?

Regarding the model:

More quads are really not necessary. Just rotating the UV coords more or less solves that problem. There are actually 4 quads already, 2 of them are just very tiny (and unneccessary if you ask me).

I fixed it (at least i think it looks great) in the example above, without adding any quads and just changing the UV.

There are also a few other details on that UV-mapping I think could use some work. The triangles underneath the V-shapes are

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Depends on what you are looking for, Micket.

If you want the current textures http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/skins/structural

rome_struct.png 	rome_struct_2.png 	rome_struct_2_spec.png 	rome_struct_arch.dds 	rome_struct_arch_norm.png 	rome_struct_arch_spec.png 	rome_struct_norm.png 	rome_struct_spec.png
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Thanks. I was assuming they were located in the art source.

I worked a bit with the rome_struct_norm.png, a made some detailed improvements.

Since there are no distances between different sections, applying the normal map plugin in Gimp (and probably the same in photoshop) will create normal ridges around edges where one sub-texture end.

post-15430-0-48772200-1427671177.png

I avoided this by doing a lot of manual copying. This workflow was pretty time consuming, and, unfortunately, if one wants to change something it's quite a bit of work.
The blend files I've seen for the other textures would be a much more scalable/modular way of composing these packed diffuse/normal/height-maps.

post-15430-0-58006800-1427674602_thumb.p

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I got the other rome struct normmap as well, but it was to big to upload here.

Feel free to zip it up or upload it elsewhere and I'll commit both.

I've checked the one you posted and it helps on the seams of the parts of the texture that are being used tiling.

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Using this diffuse map, parallax won't look good at the seams. It would have needed to have a bit of padding around the edges of each texture piece, but that would also waste texture space. A single tiling texture would have been best for this. Perhaps future OpenGL will remove the need to construct these texture-atlases (which would certainly be a blessing to us art-devs).

Then again, parallax is kind of overkill for this game (you got to soom way in so even see it). Normal maps should be fine.

So, since texture atlases are bound to stick around for quite some time, I would recommend that these texture include a bit of padding around each texture in the future. When scaling they smear together, and producing normal maps are a PITA, and parallax occlusion won't look good.. all due to the lack of padding (it would waste a bit of texture space, but it's worth that cost).

I'm working on removing the baked shadows in the diffuse texture now, side by side comparison so far:

post-15430-0-32656500-1428068393_thumb.p

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