Project Reality Forums

Kind of stuck with a little project I've been working on and the people on this forum are usually very helpful . So it's kind of just what the thread title says. I'm looking for a way of converting an object space normal map that's used on BF2 soldier models to a tangent space normal map. I know that xnormal has a tool for this but I also can't find a good tutorial for how to use that tool online. It requires me to upload the OS normal map and also the lowpoly mesh to generate the tangent normal.... but the mesh has to be in a certain format? Ik that some of you use xnormal so I was wondering if anyone used that tool before and knew an easy way of doing this.

Ultimately what I'm looking to do is re-skin a player model but I don't have the highpoly mesh to work off of I'd like to make a workable high poly AO map & cavity map to overlay onto my texture to give the diffuse a nice finish. Obviously it won't be a perfect AO w/o the highpoly but xnormal converts cavity maps from tangent space normals well enough to where I can work with them in photoshop. So if anyone has a work around to how to get a high poly AO to skin a soldier that would also be helpful.
For the people who have re-skined soldiers for the community factions; how did you do those textures? not use an AO map? was one provided from the devs?

I hope you guys can help or give me some tips and I hope the thread title is correct

Thanks in advance guys

handplane

Have a go at it with handplane. Pretty sure the normals were baked originally in Maya at DICE, although that is so long ago I am sure the tangents must have changed. So just trial and error.

You can play with the cavity settings in xnormal to pick out depth as well and kinda use that as a very light AO but my guess would be most of the texture edits are done as overlays - preserving the AO information in the texture already.

Thanks Tim I'll take a look at it

& yea, the AO is already in the diffuse on the player models I'm working on. I've messed with some things in xnormal to get a light AO like you said and so far it's turned out ok. Thanks for the help.