Nightfire texture renders

[herbius]

I've been mucking about with a normal map creator called Crazybump recently and I decided to test out some Nightfire textures on it.

Basically what it does is it looks at the texture and tries to work out how 3D it should look if it were a solid object... along those lines anyway. If you want the full explanation go to http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Normal_Maps. Strange how the world works in threes... (RGB, XYZ, what a perfect combination for normals... )

The renders below are an example of the type of technology that 007: Refraction [Source] uses. Imagine if Nightfire looked like this...


Brick wall from Romania


Red brick wall from Knox


Striped wall from Power


Phoenix symbol from Power


Sandstone wall from Knox


Detail panel from Space

My eyes can't get enough of these.

You really have to be able to move the 3D render test block to be able to appreciate them fully. If you want to try out the program, go to http://www.crazybump.com/ and download it from there.

What do you think guys?

[[George]]

cool, although it looks similar to some of the effects you can get in photoshop..

[herbius]

Photoshop can create normal maps? Well stuff that then, I'm useless because everyone uses Photoshop... lol

[Pencat]

That really just shows what you can get from Photoshop and similar programs and it only applies to 2D images. In Source games, though, the engine itself uses the textures plus maps to calculate more realistic surfaces. Those textures are dynamic, that means depending on the way the light hits them the maps change and you have the impression that the 2D image of the texture is in fact a 3D model.

But this is very different and won't look as good and especially real as the effects in Source. Maybe it gives the maps a nice polish at some points but I don't think you can improve a lot with this.

[herbius]

That really just shows what you can get from Photoshop and similar programs and it only applies to 2D images. In Source games, though, the engine itself uses the textures plus maps to calculate more realistic surfaces. Those textures are dynamic, that means depending on the way the light hits them the maps change and you have the impression that the 2D image of the texture is in fact a 3D model.

But this is very different and won't look as good and especially real as the effects in Source. Maybe it gives the maps a nice polish at some points but I don't think you can improve a lot with this.

When you say "This," "This," "This," "This," firstly are you talking about photoshop renders or bump maps, and secondly are you with or against me? I know it's not an actual 3D model that is rendered, the normal map just gives info on how to reflect light off the texture; the render from Crazybump is also just mapped onto a cube to give a preview.

BTW, believe me, without bump mapping Source games wouldn't look half as good.

[Pencat]

I don't think I'm "with you".
Let me get this straight, in Source the ENGINE uses those maps to create realistic lighting on the fly. There is no program that simply changes the texture IMAGE files to ones with map layers. In Source, there are plain texture files (as in NF) and bumpmaps. These are seperated and the game uses them to create apparent 3D surfaces. And these surfaces almost act as true 3D models. That means they are able to cast shadow on themselves and reflect light according to its material (metal reflects light different than wood etc.) and the direction the light comes from. And that's the problem: Crazybump doesn't create maps that are based on the actual lightmap. No image program is able to do so as a) they don't know the lightsources of NF map and b) they don't know at which place of the map a texture is going to be applied.
So unless you change the NF engine there is no way you can get TRUE bumpmaps, shaders that is, in NF.

Have a look at this http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorial ... ormal.html

[herbius]

[quote="Pencat":P]I don't think I'm "with you".
Let me get this straight, in Source the ENGINE uses those maps to create realistic lighting on the fly. There is no program that simply changes the texture IMAGE files to ones with map layers. In Source, there are plain texture files (as in NF) and bumpmaps. These are seperated and the game uses them to create apparent 3D surfaces. And these surfaces almost act as true 3D models. That means they are able to cast shadow on themselves and reflect light according to its material (metal reflects light different than wood etc.) and the direction the light comes from.