Custom Map Makers

Never, ever, EVER use those gimp/photoshop plugins to create normal maps.
They never turn out as good as they can be, those plugins are eons from being useful.

CrazyBump is one way to make nice normal maps, and if you really know what you're doing you can make them in 3D modeling software.

Actually, why are you using normal maps just to get height, bump maps are better for that, they can be jpeg and don't add sperm all over the place.

Here's a little ditty entitled - with - without - with a bump map...



using this bump map

I wouldn't use a bump map under this engine for anything other than parallax mapping if my life depended on it.
Besides, bump maps can't add occlusion, and highlights alone don't stand a snowballs chance in hell to add proper depth illusion.
Just look at your video, if you're standing right in front of the surface you can barely see the depth.
Blue channel occlusion doesn't suffers from this.
Also JPEG bump maps used as just bump maps always have a certain level of reflection. No alpha channel, no proper filtering.
So a bump map...i honestly can't recommend them.

I like the looks of it though..
I mean, it looks like a wall made of "clean" bricks.. I like it!

Haven't yet figured out how to properly use bump or normal maps but I guess I never will.

So what? :F

thats a good tutorial, rayne, but can you explain what you are doing at 2:00?? you added the alpha and copied the original in, i dont understand ??? xD

I created the base alpha channel from the blue channel. And then painted in the main alpha channel which is derived out of the diffuse map.

I'm not getting any feedback on this thing. Did you guys understand it? Can you even see what I'm doing. Should i put more annotations?

Rayne wrote:I'm not getting any feedback on this thing. Did you guys understand it? Can you even see what I'm doing. Should i put more annotations?

I understood it but I dont use crazybump or photoshop so I can't test it out or experiment.

I know you don't recommend using the gimp normal map plugin but are you saying it's impossible to get this result using gimp?