Original Freelancer Models - Normal/Specular Maps

Tried with crazy bump and gave up cos they sucked big time! Looked like I’d assaulted the ships with a ball pein hammer they were so ugly. Starflier wouldn’t work for some reason either, so don’t be surprised if there are problems with some of those ships and bi normal whatever you call it.

Do you have any kind of plan for this w0dk4? I notice you say “we” so I assume there are a few people planning to work on this project.

Do you have some kind of test bed for people to use so they can try making some normal maps? Not going to get very far without being able to see the result of the map on the model.

The very first demo you guys released for tow was an okay (but extremely bloated) test bed for this kind of thing, but I doubt many people have that version anymore and future versions killed that possibility. We’re gonna need something if we’re gonna help out.

For my fan arts I used to make an internal copy of a texture file, and change the gamma, contrast and brightness settings (and lowering color saturation to 0, ofc), so that the image could be used as a bump or specular layer - and it worked out fairly well to the eye, but of course it is not at all based on the displayed detail but exclusively on the pixel colors. So I guess that doesn’t quite count.

Good stuff. Should probably point out that shadermap is $40 as opposed to the ludicrous $100 for crazybump if anyone is interested in such a product.

paint.net has some plugins that are free to use and give good results for the maps itself. Tryied it once myself but wasnt sure how to apply them to the texture file - so i cancelled it and assigned it directly to the texture

the easiest way that I use is:

1. open 3dsmax
2. create squared plane
3. paint it with color texture
4. convert it to editable poly
5. add detail geometry according to color image to the plane
6. some magic with “render to texture” option to produce normal map rendering
7. profit

it is the most simple and valid technique to make proper normal maps.

using tools that operate over color image only will result in less careful normal map modelling, especially it means that high res normal maps will have awful quality and wont make cute look in final rendering.

plus there’s a lot of manuals how to do it.

This program is free and has a really good normal map tool

xNormal

The Nvidia normal plugin works just fine if you don’t have a high-resolution mesh.

Try these ones made by me for defender
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5387zec4o207g7r/nx.rar