Thief TDP and Thief TMA

[Sotha]

You can create something beautiful using any thief game if you are have talents for that

 

this is looks bad ?

 

or this ?

 

or maybe this ?

 

 

Wowzor! What a pretty screenies.. Now how do we get those mappers to work for TDM. Oh, the amount of coolness they could create with a modern engine.. Harmi, schade, shame..

[Shadowhide]

Wowzor! What a pretty screenies.. Now how do we get those mappers to work for TDM. Oh, the amount of coolness they could create with a modern engine.. Harmi, schade, shame..

personally,i hate when someone saying : "wow he's t2 map looks nice,how to make him work in TDM????"

 

 

fuck that,im tired of all this bullshit

Edited July 13, 2011 by Shadowhide

[New Horizon]

NV already called talented artists

 

I have seen those before. Yes, they're perfect for the engine in its current state, but if they update the Dark Engine to use modern lighting techniques...they wouldn't be able to use those new textures. Why? Because just like the originals, all the shading details are drawn onto the textures. If they add bump mapping and specular with modern lighting, all of those textures will still have to be remade...from scratch, but they would also have to make proper bump maps for them. You can't bake the details into modern diffuse textures the way you had to on the old engines. Those details are handled by bump maps.

[Melan]

Stop trolling each other, people. It is unproductive and a bit sad.

[Shadowhide]

Stop trolling each other, people. It is unproductive and a bit sad.

i'm didn't trolled anyone

[Dunedain]

Great work on those enhanced versions of the original artwork! If a team wants to re-create the levels of Thief and Thief 2, interconnect them, and bring in the original cut-scene artwork and voices and everything with higher polygon counts and higher res textures to recreate the games with higher detail graphics (whether in an updated version of the Thief 2 engine or TDM), that would be very cool.

[Durad]

I have seen those before. Yes, they're perfect for the engine in its current state, but if they update the Dark Engine to use modern lighting techniques...they wouldn't be able to use those new textures. Why? Because just like the originals, all the shading details are drawn onto the textures. If they add bump mapping and specular with modern lighting, all of those textures will still have to be remade...from scratch, but they would also have to make proper bump maps for them. You can't bake the details into modern diffuse textures the way you had to on the old engines. Those details are handled by bump maps.

In all honestly, I prefer the old way of texturing in most cases. I say this because nearly every game out there always takes the bump mapping to an extreme. No offense to TDM (which in MHO looks nicer than a lot of professional games), but I notice a lot of the textures I see from the screenies take the bump-mapping way too far. (like this one for instance http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/bonehoard_1.jpg)

 

Honestly, I think that many times a much more realistic look can be achieved by simply painting on the details and lighting effects. I am not saying that bump-mapping does not have its place, but I think that some of it just has to be done on the textures, and that the bump-mapping should be kept subtle.

 

No offense to anyone...just my 2 cents...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[AluminumHaste]

That's a really old texture, like 4 years old I think. I doubt it's still in the repository in that capacity.

[New Horizon]

No offense to anyone...just my 2 cents...

 

No offense taken. My point, which perhaps I didn't make clear, still stands. If you paint the shadows onto textures in engines that use bump maps, those textures will have incorrect shadowing. Unless you limit those textures to very restrictive situations where they will only be lit from a specific direction, and a dynamic moveable light will never touch them, the shading on them will look wrong....and in a lot of cases...terrible.

 

It's a matter of what looks best for the tech in question and not what looked best in the previous tech.

[nbohr1more]

The image you referenced is a poor use of normal mapping as the pattern is simple enough to look procedural. You CAN make good looking normal maps and they will not look like a "procedural effect" but instead part of the overall texture. The high barrier to entry is that most good normal maps are baked from models rather than drawn by hand. If you were planning to go "balls to the walls" with custom textures, that'll mean TONS of modeling. Fortunately the program "njob" seems to do a great job of interpreting the shading in photo sources (and even drawings) and can help you use more conventional texture methods.

 

The traditional " Doom 3" texture workflow:

 

1) Collect photo source

2) Make a high-poly model of it

3) DONT bake the light to the diffuse

3a) If desired, bake tangent space AO to diffuse

4) Use "render bump flat" in Doom 3 or a good 3rd party normal map baker like Xnormal

5) If shiny, play with specular maps or cubemaps stages to get the desired look

 

The new school "Doom 3" texture workflow:

 

1) Collect photo source or draw texture

2) Use njob to interpolate the heightmap then bake the normal map

3) Remove the shading from the photo source or drawn texture

4) If shiny, play with specular maps or cubemaps stages to get the desired look

 

 

Yes, you can ignore all that and use textures with baked shading but dynamic light sources will look wrong when they illuminate it. Some scenes with no moving illumination can benefit from baked shading in the textures but even then making baked shading look artistically consistent with realtime shading is tough. I think that anyone new to TDM or Doom 3 should first try their hardest to develop an art style that makes the most of the engine's native methods and then start using hacks and tricks like painted shading, grime AO, etc.