Tyrot's Textures

[Renzatic]

It has a couple of issues with the normalmapping around the center ring and it needs to be tweaked along the edges so it tiles better...but there's no denying that this is a sexy texture.

 

[BlackThief]

yeah, that looks pretty good

[oDDity]

What's it supposed to be? It's hard to tell if it's wood or metal. I prefer to see a JPG of the diffuse and spec maps and judge it from that.

[Renzatic]

 

I just discovered the oddest thing. I had saved these textures off of Tyrot's site and forgot to convert them from jpeg to tga before I popped them in their approrpiate folder. They're listed as tga in the material file, but the game is actually displaying a jpeg texture ingame...odd.

[Fingernail]

yeah jpgs work but they suck in terms of compression, PARTICULARLY NORMAL MAPS, as the compression artifacts actually alter the normals and show up in game.

 

That could be the source of the normal map errors you talked about...

[TYROT]

dear RENZ

 

first i didnt make this texture from a scracth.. It s not like other textures in my website..I have found this texture in free texture site but i have made the Normal maps for them

 

Just for trying to normal mapping...

 

My textures will be coming...Im baking them

 

BEST

[Renzatic]

yeah jpgs work but they suck in terms of compression, PARTICULARLY NORMAL MAPS, as the compression artifacts actually alter the normals and show up in game.

 

That could be the source of the normal map errors you talked about...

lol, I'm always the first to preach about the horrors of jpeg compression...just ask Tyrot about how I freaked out when he first sent me the griff_trim normal.

 

You could get away with it on the diffuse textures, since most of our textures are gonna have a bit more noise and rougher details on them than your average D3 texture the compression artifacts would be harder to pick out...but for a normal I wouldn't do this.

 

Oh, and the normal error I was talking about involves Tyrot playing with the design a little bit and not quite matching it up to the texture. Look at the center ring...see how it has a nice curve upward on the lower half, but on the upper half where the light is striking it more directly you can't see it...stuff like that I try to avoid, or I draw it into the diffuse so that it's defined.

 

Beyond that I'm just nitpicking...it's a great normalmap, and proof of my claims that we should move away from Photoshop and the NV plugin.

[DeepOmega]

No shit =P

 

No offense to the NV plugin, but it defeats the point of a normal map. It's a sketchy way to simulate 3D data - especially since we have so many talented 3D artists.

 

What I like most about generating normal maps in 3D is that you can do post-work in Photoshop - or you can add features later - based on actual 3D models. For instance, I've started to compile a couple of nifty details that I can put on normal maps if I decide to change it later, things like that. Plus, a lot of shapes (the ribbing on the fountain model I made comes to mind) are very difficult to simulate using a heightmap.

 

Conclusions: whoo 3D!

[Renzatic]

For some things using the NV plugin is alright, like totally flat surfaces that have a few details that are easily picked up by it, but for everything else it sucks.

 

It's quite literally a glorified emboss effect.