Is it possible to combine 2 normal maps (one tiled) and a regular diffuse map (or 2)? That's 3-4 images total. Adding the second normal map should be simple math (max (0, min (255, x - 128)) or so), but I could be sooo wrong. It may also be too long, or slow, for a shader.

I'm looking to do things like chainmail and scales, closer than a regular-sized texture can handle, and preferraly with 2 diffuse maps as well, regular and tiled.

I can do it in Blender, though using a bump-map for the tiles, which doesn't look great but it's much better than nothing. But Blender has 8 texture channels per material, and the 3DGS shaders I've looked at only use 1 or 2. It might be possible to finagle ARGB files with a custom format, if necessary, though that seems a bit crazy.

It should allow for smaller textures, like 2 at 512 instead of 1 at 2048.

The min/max is a slight problem with flattening the extremes, but keeping the tiled normal or bump map shallow is OK.

Or am I just cracking smoke?

Dave Heinemann, 2400 poly humanoid.

Just to get this right:
You want a normalmappingshader with:
2 normalmaps (1 general + 1 tiled for extra detail)
2 diffuse maps (again 1 general + 1 tiled for extra detail)
?

If thats the case, it is very possible indeed.
As for 3dgs's texture channels: I'm currently working on a shader which uses 8 textures. 4 through entSkin and 4 thorugh mtlSkin, so there is no problem on this side.

Thanks - I had just found no way (so far) to use more than 2 textures, so I didn't wnat to spend 'a million years' making uber-detailed models that wouldn't show up that well.

I have some decent textures for tiling, like chainmail and fabrics as well as more generic seamless noisy effects, so extreme closeups can look good.

My question about the double normal-mapping was whether I need some fancier math (since 'zero' is pure blue, so adding two forward-facing pixels would get 510), is there an existing shader to take care of it, or is it easy enough to do?

May your real death be as cool as your best game death, and take a hell of a lot longer to get to

Dave Heinemann

hey,
One solution I use is doubling textures using photo editing software.
Many of my shaders use the alpha channels of textures as secondary textures.
You can make the alpha channel of the bump map a specular map for example.

if you do this you can basically get up to 32 single-channel textures that you can parse out for your own needs.

You could also add extra samplers from shared file space.

In other words, your task is a cake-walk in shader performance terms.