Blog: "I'm a Material Boy"

**Luis** · 09-21-2009, 11:50 PM

Time for introducing the Material Editor.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2009...l-boy.html

**Sexbad** · 09-22-2009, 12:21 AM

That's a pretty neato-looking feature.

Unfortunately I know absolutely nothing about normal mapping or bump mapping or specular mapping or parallax mapping except that they're all related somehow.

**eliasfrost** · 09-22-2009, 07:14 AM

Parallax mapping! <3 Big Grin

:

**WindexGlow** · 09-23-2009, 05:00 AM

Blast! I've been foiled!

Bump - Tints pixels based on lighting (making it have much more detail)
Spec - Adds tone based on lighting + player view (think of sun glare off a car)
parallax - Not entirely sure how it works, but it creates the impressive of a 3d surface based on player camera and not lights I believe.

I'm off on all of those but it should help you get the basic idea.

**Sexbad** · 09-23-2009, 08:10 PM

(09-23-2009, 05:00 AM)WindexGlow Wrote: Bump - Tints pixels based on lighting (making it have much more detail)
Spec - Adds tone based on lighting + player view (think of sun glare off a car)
parallax - Not entirely sure how it works, but it creates the impressive of a 3d surface based on player camera and not lights I believe.

I believe I understand all that but am confused about where normal mapping comes in to play because from what I've seen it just does exactly what parallax mapping does.

**WindexGlow** · 09-23-2009, 09:27 PM

I haven't worked with normal too much, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have the artifacts parallax does (the stretching texture) but isn't as accented/noticeable
Hard to explain I guess.

**eliasfrost** · 09-23-2009, 10:31 PM

The different (as for what you actually see) between normal and parallax is that normal only add shading depending on the lightning, while parallax adds depth to the texture (and shading). The technical aspect is a lot more complex than that though.

**WindexGlow** · 09-24-2009, 12:36 AM

^bump and normals render quite differently though.

**eliasfrost** · 09-24-2009, 08:16 AM

But the outcome is pretty much the same from what I understand?

**Thomas** · 09-24-2009, 11:00 AM

Normalmapping changes the shading, that is how how lights affects a surface. A normalmapped surface without any lights on it does not look anything different.
Parallax offsets the texture uv coordinate (as explained in blog) and this means that it changes the look of a surface even if it is unlit. Parallax also offsets the point from where the normalmap information is gotten (normalmap uses same uv as color-texture) and therefore parallax indirectly affects the shading too.