Quote:

uh, for specular you could apply the texture to the model and then generate a spec map based on some lighting at a certain angle etc. That's more or less what spec maps are. Fake lighting effects



This makes no sense. Specular maps are not "fake lighting". All a spec map does is control the amount of specular reflection at a given point. That is, certain areas are made more or less shiny by multiplying the spec map with the specular component calculated in the shader.

The easiest way to automatically make a spec map is simply to use the regular color map...and you can can change it a bit in the shader if you want by brightening or darkening it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:

Normalmaps seem to be quite easy so far, as there are the engine function bmap_to_normals and some other codes for it out here. Heightmaps should be easy to create, too, although I don't really know how to do it. I think the blue channel of a dot3 normalmap could be already seen as "sort of a heightmap"



This is a great idea if you want your lighting to look like crap. Sometimes you can get away with converting a regular texture to a normal map, but normally only for organic rough textures like dirt or grass.

For Doom3 for instance, most of the normal maps were created by rendering actual models...this is an automatic generation in a way.

The blue channel of a normal map gives you the slope, not the height.. that's a totally different thing, and you might as well use a picture of a clown.

Sphere Engine--the premier A6 graphics plugin.