Hey Drew just one question how do you do the normal maps and specular maps for level geometry like in your example. Thanks.

-spider21

Find a good texture, save it. Make a B/W version, save it.
Run the black and white image through photoshops normal plugin (ati or nvidia's cant remember). copy the b/w version into the alpha channel of your normal map, save that as name_maps.
I included a turtorial with that download...

Wow thanks for the quick reply I'll go try that.

-spider21

http://www.zarria.net/

Here is a good bit of info for something that is a bit more accurate than just using a single grey scale image for the normal map.

I myself tend to model out most of my normal maps...it takes a bit longer (not too much since you don't have to worry about topology or polycounts) and then create the normal map from the actual mesh itself.

IMPORTANT:
my shader code uses an unflipped y in the normal map.. many dot3 converters flip the y in the normal automatically--including ATIs converter.. so basically if you use that make black the "highest" color and white the "lowest" so just invert your normal map(normally you think of white as the highest and black as the lowest). Some converters do have the option to change your y vector.. i suggest ORB (open render bump).

thanks matt! theres an option in the nvidia photoshop plug to flip y...

myrlyn68 - GREAT LINK! love the digital cam normal map technique! Excellent.

also, part of my tutorial is how to make a normal map from meshes in max, and exported to A6...

Anyone know a way to make a dynamic light for this shader? like a flashlight, or attached to a swinging physics lantarn...thx

I haven't had a chance to try this one out yet - but it looks as though normal dynamic lights should work with it.



As far as the tutorial goes...I would recomend a change (but he had already written such a nice one which covers most of it...). As opposed to using a normal flashlight, use something which will diffuse the light on your target object. I have a few photography flood lights in the studio which have diffusers on them for this purpose, but for those who don't have access to those try using a large sheet of white poster board. Shine the flashlight onto that and then "bounce" the reflected light onto your subject. This helps to avoid hot spots on the subject matter that will occur with certain materials (plastics, metals, polished wood/stone...) and ruin the normal map. This also becomes important if you are making a normal map of larger subjects.

These are great shots, Matt! How far down could we expect this to be converted, btw?
It would be cool to have those shaders working on g4 cards, too (PS 1.3)... would that be possible?

Thanks Gazzbass, but this doesn't help
i have only a black screen

Is anyone having texture tesselation matching problems when implementing this shader?

I tried using a tile texture with normal map in this test level, all unscaled, and got this:



The floor is a simple block, no CSG subtract operations done on it, etc, therefore its not an offset problem.

Is there some sort of translation matrix that can be tweaked within the shader code, or is it perhaps something really dumb that I'm overlooking? Any Ideas?

Anyway, I'm off to my book store to buy a book on DX9 HLSL!

Gary.