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What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes? - Printable Version

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What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes? - Radical Batz - 05-24-2015

As the title says, what did fg use to make that kind of stuff, with gimp it looks like total shit, tried ssbump still not good enough, does anyone know the program that fg used to edit those planes and make them look 3dish? thnx

RE: What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes? - MrBehemoth - 05-24-2015

Whilst you can use things like ssbump to turn a height map into a normal map, your going to need a decent height map to start with. If you plug your diffuse map into ssbump, it's gonna come out wrong. I suspect that FG either used some special texture painting software, or modelled the topography in 3d and baked it to a normal, or just got stuck in and painted a height map by hand.

The last one is what I usually do, creating a height it in Ps, as a layer over the diffuse, before converting it to a normal in ssbump. There's probably lots of different methods (and tutorials) for doing that.

RE: What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes? - Romulator - 05-24-2015

Edit: Just realised you mentioned planes in your title. You can really make normals for anything with a texture. Daniel's hand was one which I just happened to had done recently.

I honestly just use Photoshop for Normal Maps. If you know what you are doing when using nVidia's Texture Tools, you can make Normal Maps pretty easily.

Spoiler below!

More or less:
Code:
~Romulator's guide to making basic* normal maps~

- Open in Photoshop
- Generate the normals
   - Height Generation: 4 Sample
      - Scale: 5
   - Height Source: Average RGB
   - Alpha Field: Unchanged
- Duplicate layer
- Gaussian Blur the duplicate layer (0.6 - 1.2 pixels), repeat 3 times.
- Set the duplicate layer as an Overlay.

*basic in that there are better, and more accurate ways.

Bass Relief can be used somewhere to get some really good heights.

I don't model, so normals are really for me to interpret purely based on visual approach. My method will give you a normal map and nothing else. You can probably get a better one with some experimentation, but since I don't model, and rather just try retexturing, I simply make my normals fit their purpose.

For example: http://puu.sh/hYHSa/4d61629653.jpg
The top is Amnesia's hand model and map. The bottom is my hand model and map.
Glove fabric lacks height; so its more subtle how much is there. But where they end (fingertips and wrist), we need more defined height.

I can't model, so feel free to shout at me about how high my stuff is.

Oh, and this how it appears in the Model Viewer: http://puu.sh/hYIm8/cbad0adbdf.jpg
The model more or less gives the shape, and the normal portrays the fabric height of the glove.

Speculars and other stuff (except Alpha; black what you don't want, white everything you need), I have no idea what to do.

RE: What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes? - Traggey - 05-25-2015

Photoshop.

And it's not gimps fault, it takes some skill and knowledge to create these things, gimp is a perfectly fine tool for doing so.