AquaticPenguin wrote:Well, at least people are using normal maps. And I'm suprised how good things look even without them. I guess the maps are generated from the textures because of the amount of work needed to make a high detail model. Perhaps we'll see a bigger uptake on normal maps in the future, especially with how powerful graphics cards are now and how "old" normal mapping has become.
Yea, but normal maps are the future, and present... All newer games (hell even BF2 here uses them), so they should be a part of the artist' toolbag imo.
Normal maps can give performance gains as well, thats the whole point anyway - at the cost of memory space of course. Although people with medium/low settings start at lower LODs (level of detail) where normal maps usually aren't applied, so people running this way arent really using them.
AquaticPenguin wrote:
To be honest I've never really seen the appeal of specular maps, they seem to add very little to the detail for quite a lot of work. Also, don't normal and specular maps require a lot more memory, maybe that could pose a problem if everything has 3/4 different textures.
Specular maps have been around longer than normal maps, and for older games such as BF2 is is just a greyscale map. It only takes a few minutes to make if the diffuse map is made in layers. Just a matter of copying, desasaturating, selecting by material layer and then brightness/contrast/levels.
Of course newer games include 24 bit specular to lay the basis for specualr level + color, but it is not an issue around here where the spec maps are hidden in the alpha channels (thus 8bit greyscale)
EDIT: on the point that you never really seen the appeal of spec maps... wow, hehe
without a spec map a normal map is pretty useless as the illusion just fails imho.
Spec maps are at the core of creating material definition - differentiating between metal and concrete for instance. Both of these often have nearly the same type of diffuse map, but the specular map makes all the difference. Concrete is not shiney at all, but metal is.
AquaticPenguin wrote:
And one more question before I become irritating. Are AO maps baked into the diffuse maps? That seems like a place that could get a lot of realism add for no performance overhead. I guess you could normalize everything by introducing tighter standards, but I think that almost goes against the nature of contributors since they're all doing it in their free time.
To be honest I don't know who around here does it, but I suspect that that it is a very low percentage
Me and another DEV have been discussing doing a proper tutorial because of the reasons you mention - added shadow effects and realism with no extra cost in performance or memory usage.
AquaticPenguin wrote:
maybe a bit off topic but.... yeah.....
Hehe, yea
but some good questions non the less. You seem like you know your way around the world of CG. If you do modding in your spare time, I am sure that some people around here could use a talented hand.
// Sorry for the off topic Chris, will delete these if you want to clean the thread up
btw it's fucking early and i need to go to sleep now (05:37 am) so i'll see if i can get this beauty going tomorrow 
