Hitomi Tiponi

Stuff normal and specular maps - I want parrallax maps now!

Why did you do that to us Adeon?

KT Kingsley

Huh - so now that those normal maps which everybody was clamouring for are a distinct possibility, they ain't good enough any more.

Leah Mayo

KT Kingsley

Duh, yeah. I guess that's what Hitomi said. The words are different, and in a different order, too. (It's a first post on a new page issue, honest.)

Sveid Heidenstam

Now that we've promised to put the fires out you want us to stop the bleeding, too?

You people are never satisfied! Next you'll be demanding we set the broken bones!

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Doomed Ship - SL's largest, most detailed and immersive sci-fi/horror build.

Geenz Spad

Which can also be very unfriendly to performance.

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DanielRavenNest

They bring Second Life about to where graphics engines were a decade ago. Better than before, but still way behind the state of the art. Here are the map slots for the CryEngine 3.4:



More advanced engines also have "shaders", which handle the given maps in different ways, and have extra adjustment parameters. For example, skin and glass are rendered differently than opaque objects. Here is a list of CryEngine 3.4 shaders:

Shader Reference - Doc 2. Sandbox Manual - CryENGINE 3 Free SDK

Of course, there is still no single graphics card that can run the CryEngine at full rate with all the settings maxed out. It can be done with multiple high end cards, but not a single one. The average SL user has no hope of reaching that level, so be happy with normal and specular maps, they are a huge step up.

Nephilaine Protagonist

/me wipes drool away, sighs.

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Da5id Weatherwax

Ye gods, Neph.. Turn you loose on a system for SL that could do all that? All it would need is decent cloth physics and none of the rest of us would stand a chance, you'd be the Anshe Chung of the fashion world

Maggiedoll Alter

/me sighs dreamilly, imagining an SL with real simulated fabric.

How long you think that'll take to actually be reasonably do-able so far as normal-ish high-ish end type systems? Ten or twenty years?

Most of my serious processing power is lacking in graphics. Anybody happen to have a spare PCI-X graphics card?

Myf

Significantly less...


To be clear, that's from two years ago. CCP are intending to have that tech in their World of Darkness social mmorpg.

Maggiedoll Alter

OMG.
And you even have to show me the corsets!

*dies*

Adeon Writer

I should have also mentioned, that unlike normalmaps, parallax aren't natively supported on GPU's for decades like Normalmaps are, they are actually FPS eaters, not optimizers.

I still haven't seen any videogame that uses them. Only graphical demos showing things off. (Or maybe they ARE used and the illusion is so good I think it's rendered geometry?)

StaticTheFox

Crysis 1 & 2 use parallax mapping, AFAIK.

DanielRavenNest

Yes, it's been in there since CryEngine 2, here is the current manual page for it:

Parallax Occlusion Mapping - Doc 2. Sandbox Manual - CryENGINE 3 Free SDK

It is not recommended to use it, or some of the other advanced features of that engine, for everything in the scene. Part of the reason they have different shaders for different kinds of materials is to only do the relevant calculations where you need it.

Tesselation and displacement mapping are replacing Parallax Mapping for graphics cards that can handle DirectX 11. They have parts of the graphics chip custom designed to do that in hardware, which is always much faster. Same story with physics - that is being incorporated into custom silicon on the chip.

Adam Zaius

Normals actually aren't natively supported on a GPU either. The common operations (dot products, etc) required to calculate them however are.

The problem with parallax maps is they require a lot more calculations than normals alone. They are pretty however - using a proper LOD fallback pathway however (through to normals, then normal diffuse/specular) you can make parallax mapping work by restricting it to high end GPUs with massive fill rates.

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DanielRavenNest

Hair and cloth are similar level graphics. Nvidia had realistic hair working in their 400 series GPUs (two generations ago). Having it work in a busy scene rather than by itself like this demo won't take long:

Qie Niangao

Two remedial graphics questions from one who is hopelessly behind the times:

First, how are these maps usually constructed? I mean, I have a vague idea that one might make massively complex geometry, and then tell a program (Blender?) to collapse parts of that geometry into normal and spectral maps corresponding to the shape and reflectivity of the surfaces of those parts. Is that anything like how this is done?

Second, given whichever maps we have as a palette, is there trickery involved in how they interact and perhaps faking to some degree other maps -- where that trickery is made obsolete if additional features are added to the palette? I'm thinking, for example, that bumpmaps seem like they're trying to fake the effects of normalmaps (kind of), and that they'd be either useless or used very differently when normalmaps are available. Or maybe one is a fallback to the other for rendering on lower-end hardware? Or am I just confused?

(Maybe it would save space to just point in the general direction of stuff I should read to catch up with what's happened in computer graphics in the decades since I've paid any attention.)

Adeon Writer

You have described pretty much how Normalmaps are generated. Specularmaps though, not sure. I think they're done by hand actually. (It's just greyscale painting where you want shiny.)

SL Bumpmaps are a hack - whatever they are actually trying to do is pretty well lost on me. I don't know if they will "work correctly" with normalmaps, but they already don't work on curved prims like spheres, so, don't be too worried about it I'd think. There's nothing hacky about normalmaps though, they're a pretty standard process.

Short version:

Long version: Normal Mapping Tutorial by Ben Cloward - page 1

stora

I understand the basics, maybe this will help others.

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Color Map Normal Mapping - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Laverne Unit

Pretty much. You model a detailed mesh with whatever geometry you like, and then make what is essentially a low-LOD version (e.g. a flat plane instead of one with lots of ridges on it). Blender can then bake the normals of the high-poly model to the low-poly model with an option called "bake selected to active". Bonus: you only need to do a UV map for the low-poly model, so you can go as crazy as you like with your geometry in the high-poly.

You can also use "floating geometry" - essentially you model lots of little details, like rivets or panels or lights, and have them positioned in space above the surface of your low-poly. Again, you "bake selected to active" and all the details are put into the normal map. The Sci-Fi panel tutorial I mentioned earlier in the thread covers this in great detail.

Another way to create a normal map doesn't involve any modelling at all.This is really useful for simple shapes or for getting a normal map of a tileable texture for quick use. You can use nDo for this, which is a free plugin for Photoshop. This nDo tutorial explains it better than I can, but basically you can either start with a photo/tileable texture and get a normal map from it, or you can create shapes in Photoshop and have them turned into normal maps. nDo2 is the new version, but costs money - quite a bit for the commercial license. There's also Crazybump (again, not free) for creating normal maps from textures.

As far as I know, specular maps are always done by hand. Part 2 of that Sci-Fi panel tutorial covers making them.

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KT Kingsley

I'll second the Sci-Fi panel tutorial, and not just because of what it describes primarily, but also because of its inspirational value. This is an experienced and reasonably talented artist doing complex stuff in a fraction of the time it'd take me. Until I get more familiar with Blender, of course.

Chip Midnight

Thanks for posting the link to the original nDo. I couldn't find it the other day when I went looking for it. The original site was taken offline when nDo2 came out.

Casey Pelous

Dear me -- I'm actually turning into an old fart. Two pages into this thread I was having an attack of, "DAMN these newfangled contraptions! "

*sigh*

Okay, must get over self and just learn.

If I start ordering Frisbees off my lawn, somebody just shoot me, k?

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melponeme_k

That is the ugliest avatar I've ever seen. The movements are wrong, everything is wrong about it. The only thing that looks remotely normal is the clothing.

And people wonder why many avatars cause disgust in the non-gaming audience?