Normal Mapped Weapons?

[heavyness]

as systems get faster and faster, everthing will be normal mapped. but since its still new and takes up CPU, secondary things like weapons wont be normal mapped. i'm not saying no games have done it, but they're using all polys and power for more important things like characters, dynamics, effects, and limbo contests.


so to answer your question, yes and no.

[AlecMoody]

I can't really see what a normal could add to a 2000 or 3000 poly gun model. At this point we can model pretty much every detail on a gun without issue.

Also, normal maps on mechanical structures can soften hard lines and screw with things more than they help.

[heavyness]

I can't really see what a normal could add to a 2000 or 3000 poly gun model. At this point we can model pretty much every detail on a gun without issue.

Also, normal maps on mechanical structures can soften hard lines and screw with things more than they help.

for modern guns, no, normal mapping wont help [since they're just metal blocks]. but antiques and futuristic guns it would come in handy.

[cuervomuerte]

eventually it can add a lot maybe not for all weapons/accessories but larger things. the first thing that came to my mind would be sheilds, since these can tend to be pretty large in size. this a quick thing i have done.

http://seanvowels.pixelelation.com/images/sheild-normal.jpg

the sheild is only 208 polys with no texture just normal map.

*edit spelling*

[AlecMoody]

that shield looks cool and all but I don't really see anything there I couldn't do with a diffuse map. 9/10 people won't notice or care about the dynamic lighting anyway.

[JYoung]

that shield looks cool and all but I don't really see anything there I couldn't do with a diffuse map. 9/10 people won't notice or care about the dynamic lighting anyway.

Those unnoticeable things can still add a lot to the overall feel.

[Motives]

its already games with normalmapped weaps.. go play far cry for example

[GLandolina]

Those unnoticeable things can still add a lot to the overall feel.
yes but his point was that it could be just the same with a diffuse map, on such a low-detail model the dynamic lighting isnt even noticed.
i know what you mean but its just not noticed there.

[StrangeFate]

It is noticed depending of the lighting in the game. Battlefield Vietnam sports normalmaps for characters, but due to the lighting you can't almost see them at all.

The problem is rather that people still don't know how to properly take advantage of normalmaps.

[AlecMoody]

I think the danger is that people will make everything look massively gaudy and unrealistic just so that we can all see they are using normal maps. Personally I think the weapons in doom3 look terrible, largely because of the normal maps and gloss they stuck on them.

[GoK]

Personaly i think the weapon models in Doom look awsome and id be proud of art like that in my PF! I dont see why cos they arnt undestated it looks bad!? remember the impact the first screenshots of doom had... the game would not have had the same BIG BUSTY IMPACT it has if they had toned down the weapons IMO.

Jody

[G0st]

Well when it comes to normal mapping weapons its maing on beveled edges and intrusions right? The weapon im doing now

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/famas.jpg

(wip) Where would i put the normal maps on this, Any suggestions?

One thing that the project leader said that normal maps help light objects light better?

[StrangeFate]

you would usually model the whole gun in hipoly and then just bake the whole thing. YOu either apply a normalmap to the whole model or not at all.

[iSOBigD]

Yup. The normal map is baked using the UV map of your model, so you have to map the low poly model before giving it a normal map (from a high poly version). You can use plugins if your app doesn't have that feature or just download that Melody program...from NVIDIA, I believe.

Anyway, I think normal mapping on anything is great (assuming the object needs the detail). They have normal mapped weapons in Painkiller, Far Cry, HL2, Doom 3, and most good looking FPS coming out (and some RPGs). I don't see why you wouldn't use that feature if the engine allows it. You can actually lower poly counts for weapon models (why waste 5000 polys when you can use 2000 and make it look like 200k?) and make them look much nicer.

[iSOBigD]

Oh, one more thing. The reason why normal mapping isn't very noticible in some games (like BF:Vietnam, MoH:Pacific Assault, HL2, etc.) is because they usually have mostly static lights or sunlight. Since the light doesn't move around the models (or vice versa) too much, you can't really notice the lighting changing on the model.

Since Doom 3 uses small rooms with lights all over and models walking/crawling/flying by them, every little bump is much more noticible. It's not that people don't know how to use them yet, but it's just that some people want big open areas with one light (the sun), so they can't really go the Doom 3 way.

[FreakyDude]

Oh, one more thing. The reason why normal mapping isn't very noticible in some games (like BF:Vietnam, MoH:Pacific Assault, HL2, etc.) is because they usually have mostly static lights or sunlight. Since the light doesn't move around the models (or vice versa) too much, you can't really notice the lighting changing on the model.

Since Doom 3 uses small rooms with lights all over and models walking/crawling/flying by them, every little bump is much more noticible. It's not that people don't know how to use them yet, but it's just that some people want big open areas with one light (the sun), so they can't really go the Doom 3 way.

Well I really enjoyed doom3 and I did very much notice every normal mapped object, and the way the light makes the normal maps seem like 3d objects. (is it modeled? No, another normal mapped object) But I to ussually enjoy more open environments, and would it be noticable in those environments? If open environments used dynamic lighting, wouldn't the system specs go way up?

[G0st]

Well heres the famas, almost finished (missing ironsight and trigger)


http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/famas.jpg

If anyones got any crits im taking em now with a side of fries =P
(tri count is at 55XX, limited to 6000, im still going to reduce it)


G0st

[G0st]

I was curious about something, my map:

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/famasmap.jpg

I have alot of planar mapping to save space, is this going to affect the Normal Maps?

[EarthQuake]

Well the idea with normal mapping weapons is so you dont have to use 3000 polygons, if you look into doom3's weapons they are in the 600-1000 poly range, and the world models are even less like 200-400. Tho you still need around 2000 to get a real nice silohuet for large guns like rifles and such. To address the claim about normal maps making everything look plasticy in doom3 thats just plain wrong. Its lack of control of the specular cone(or glossiness) that gives everything the same specular highlights just at different levels, someone on the doom3world.org forums made a shader to fix this but i think it requires an extra map(diffuse,normal,spec,gloss). To show everyone the usefulness of normal maps on weapons you really need a cool gun to do it, doom3's are very cool IMO and have lots of shapes and detail that you actually notice it... Even if you're doing realistic guns theres still things that can be added from normal maps but its not as noticable, i recently did a bunch of weapons for a game called poacher and most of them except the last one had bump maps convert to normals, for the last one i had a high poly model already made and it looked MUCH MUCH better, i would show the difference here but i dont think im allowed. And finally here is a shot of a weapon i did recently that is 100% sub-d(which works very well for normal maps) this is only the high poly model i havent gotten down to doing the low poly or uv maps but let me assure you it will look very cool when its done and in doom3, its Shirow's mn23 just so everyone knows im not taking credit for the design just the model.
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/crash/earthquake/mn2307.jpg

[EarthQuake]

Oh man, i took the time to write out a great post explaining everything i understood about this stuff and it just dosent show up, wtf? Thats awesome.

[G0st]

ok so basically what your telling me is i can get away with a 2000 Tri gun and make a normal map and it would look the just as good as a 6000 tri gun? I wasnt aware that gun counts or any count for that matter is recuded by that much! So i guess i could reduce my count, but im still curious, where would i add normal maps to my Famas? If i make the gun smoother in areas (turn my 10 side cylinder to a 50 side cylinder or certain bolts) is that going to affect it greatly? And ps, im still curious about the Planar facing on my UVMap, is it going to affect my normal map? Im thinking yes....


Please helP!

G0st

[YuriyXXX]

what software are you using?

and it does not matter how you unwrap your model.

[Riccard]

Hi,

Let me introduce myself, I'm Riccard Linde. AD for Battlefield.

I've not been online for a very long time. But caught up with work my membership became forgotten, I have now finally found some time again.

Normal maps was never used for guns in Vietnam for Performance, quality and memory reasons. Using Tangent space normal maps very close to Camera with dxt1 compressions creates some very ugly artifacts. Something that is solved with newer compression methods. We faked the depth and information with modeling and an interesting specularmap for Vietnam.

If you to want, you can check out the book I just wrote about these things. It just got published by Charles River media. Game Art: Creation, Direction and Careers.

Instead of characters (that is always the main thing in all other books) this book covers guns and hard material things like houses etc. Tips and tricks.

/Riccard Linde
www.riccardlinde.com (http://www.riccardlinde.com/)

[Riccard]

ok so basically what your telling me is i can get away with a 2000 Tri gun and make a normal map and it would look the just as good as a 6000 tri gun? I wasnt aware that gun counts or any count for that matter is recuded by that much! So i guess i could reduce my count, but im still curious, where would i add normal maps to my Famas? If i make the gun smoother in areas (turn my 10 side cylinder to a 50 side cylinder or certain bolts) is that going to affect it greatly? And ps, im still curious about the Planar facing on my UVMap, is it going to affect my normal map? Im thinking yes....


Please helP!

G0st

You can keep the polygon count as low as 100 polygons (in theory :) ) as long as the silhouette looks smooth, sharp and detailed. The interaction with the light on the areas that is not in the profile of the object can be used for normal mapping. (Remember that to get sharp edges, you will need LARGE textures)

Answering the Bolts question: they can be removed completely if not being in the silhouette on flat surfaces as long as you apply a normal map with efficient information that can replace the visual representation.

NormalMapping does not help the profile of the gun, if you look down the barrel, you can have the scope and things that is in the silhouette to the world concentrated with the available polygons and smoothly detailed. The flat areas that will never be seen in a profile, make all these in Normalmapping.

This way you keep the polygons amount low, while taking the most advantage of the normalmap.

Remember that normal maps are not free. If its just used for a single detail its most likely better to not use it at all. If applied and used, with that large texture memory spent make sure you take full use of it. ;)

[Riccard]

I was curious about something, my map:

<<CUT OUT IMAGE>>

I have alot of planar mapping to save space, is this going to affect the Normal Maps?

If you are going to use Tangent mapping, you should consider not overlapping any surfaces in the UV if the object (weapon) should be seen from both surfaces (directions).

Tangent normal mapping doesn't support flipping of the UV's by nature, so the light will turn up looking inverted on one of the side if they are mapped overlapped.

Another idea would be to try to maximize the UV space as much as possible, scale up the areas that you know will utilize more normalmapping that other areas, together with the areas that would benifit from having a higher pixel UV ratio. For every drawn line in a colormap it takes 3 lines for a normalmapping to get the same line representable. So to get it to look really sharp is tough.

[G0st]

i fixed up the body and brought down the Tri count to 456, is that small enough? This is my first time using normal maps so this is kind of a step by step process for me. I maintained the silhouette of the gun body but got rid of certain extra details. I will post what i think the normal mapped one should look like.


http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/Famaslow.jpg
Crits and comments welcomed (please)

[G0st]

Ok i ran into a problem (can be done other ways). Im trying to smooth the top of the famas, so its more rounded. How would i do this but maintain hard edges where i want it to. This is directed towards Maya 6.0 Users. What is the best and simplest way to get a smooth object opposed to drawing it by hand?


Anyone?

I saw someone tell me SubDiv is good, tried it but it didnt turn out the way i wished it did....

[G0st]

ok well i got the SubD working fine, question now, Does smoothign groups on Normal Mapped weapons change the way it looks on the low poly one? Im guessing yes, but if not that would save me loads of time (have to fix all the smoothing now)

[GoK]

im not an expert on the subject but i would think the normal mapping would overide any smoothing groups as they both effect(or add to) the normals of the model! so i dont think you would bother setting up smoothing groups just all as one group if you know what i mean.

Jody

[G0st]

Ok im having alot of trouble viewing Normal Maps, i tried Cryteks poly bump, doesnt show, i went to Mayas RayDisplace web site (plugin) And the guy cant make instructions well at all, im at a loss. Anyone know where i can get a program to view normal maps? Melody doesnt work because i have a DX 8.1 Card, it doesnt let me load up melody, sais i need PerPixel 2,0 something


Anyone?

[Riccard]

Ok im having alot of trouble viewing Normal Maps, i tried Cryteks poly bump, doesnt show, i went to Mayas RayDisplace web site (plugin) And the guy cant make instructions well at all, im at a loss. Anyone know where i can get a program to view normal maps? Melody doesnt work because i have a DX 8.1 Card, it doesnt let me load up melody, sais i need PerPixel 2,0 something


Anyone?

Just view them within Maya.

If you are using 6.0 you can connect the color channel (OUT) from the normal map 'Out color' into the 'Normal Camera' channel of your shader using the hypershader connection editor in Maya. To view it, it will require you to have high quality rendering on in the viewport, otherwise it will not show up. (Any light you create will interact with this model)

This method always works. But depending on the gfx card you have. and as you got the note you did from Melody you might be running a Geforce 4mx or something? regardless, if you have a gfx card that supports pixel shaders you should be able to run 1.3 shaders atleast with this method:

If you are using Maya 6.0 or Maya 6.5 with bonustools and installed NVIDIA's CGFX 1.3 shader and runtime/compiler you'll get Shaders right in your viewport. This way you can combine the Normalmap with reflections map and a lot of other interesting visual goodies. (This is light limited however)

(If everything fails, stick with the connection editor and color to normal camera) ;)

www.Irfanview.com (http://www.irfanview.com/) is a fast imageviewer where you can view the DDS textures and scroll through them (need the extra plugin pack). (Don't know if Acdsee has support for DDS yet)

[Riccard]

ok well i got the SubD working fine, question now, Does smoothign groups on Normal Mapped weapons change the way it looks on the low poly one? Im guessing yes, but if not that would save me loads of time (have to fix all the smoothing now)

Hmm. Dont know exactly if you are asking for the baking but here comes two in one answer.

This is what I think you are after:
Smoothing groups on a Hires model that will be rendered INTO the lowres - YES it does, if you use a faceted highres as your source you will get a normalmap that looks faceted. So fixing smoothing groups is essential and changes the result drasticly.

I would say it probably better to have them all smooth and try to model things hard in the highres if you require a sharp edge in the normalmap.

If you on the other hand are asking about the smoothing group on the lowres then the answer is this: Yes. Vertexes are still the king. You want to make sure that all edges are smooth on your lowres except the very ones you really want to portrait as hard - (keeps performance up).

I think you solved this problem already just by testing but, never the less...

Good luck.

[G0st]

Sorry riccard if you could explain exatly what you mean, i know the shading network not to well, but from what i understand you need 2 seperate shaders, one for the high res one for low res, In the shader network connect the blinn(highres model) onto the blinn2(lowres model) and choose Other, frm that menu on Output side choose color and on input side choose Normal Camera?

Ill give it a few tries and get back to you

[quote]If you are using 6.0 you can connect the color channel (OUT) from the normal map 'Out color' into the 'Normal Camera' channel of your shader using the hypershader connection editor in Maya. To view it, it will require you to have high quality rendering on in the viewport, otherwise it will not show up. (Any light you create will interact with this model)
[quote]

[Riccard]

Sorry riccard if you could explain exatly what you mean, i know the shading network not to well, but from what i understand you need 2 seperate shaders, one for the high res one for low res, In the shader network connect the blinn(highres model) onto the blinn2(lowres model) and choose Other, frm that menu on Output side choose color and on input side choose Normal Camera?

Ill give it a few tries and get back to you

I'm sorry, I explained it very clumpsy. Yes, That is when you want to view the final normalmap on the lowresolution mesh.

1. texture node (file) w/ normalmap
2. your low res shader.

Hypershade / WorkArea..
With SHIFT pressed down, MMB click and drag, release over the low-res shader (preferable phong or blinn, due to that you want to see highlights (Specular)) icon. This bring up the connection editor - just connect OUT COLOR to NORMAL CAMERA.

Go into the Viewport, menu Shading/ turn on HIGH quality Rendering.

Create a directional light or any similar light - select 'use selected light' in the viewport menu and then select the light and rotate it. You should now see the normalmap interaction on your lowres model.

I hope I was more clear this time, sorry about that.

[EarthQuake]

Mirroring UVs depends on the engine, for example nearly everything in doom 3 is mirrored.

[G0st]

ok well i did what was told, but i cant see the Normal Mapped weapon on the low res model, although in certain areas it looks differnt, bt the main thing is i cant see the bolts!

here is a print screen

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/famasnormals.jpg
steps included this

1. Created Phong 1 material Assigned Phong 1 to low-res model
2. Created Phong 2 material Assigned Phong 2 to high-res model
3. Selected MMB-Drag Phong 2 over to Phong 1
4. Selected output - "Out color" And Input "Normal Camera"
5. Created Directional light with Default Attributes
6. Shading, High Quality Rendering
7. Lighting Selected Lights only

Now from what i know, the bolts SHOULD show up on the low res model, but they do not? Is this due to my UVMapping? Its not planar faces anymore, everything has its own space each side and all. Also, (when i get home) i will show you how the normal map renders out with ATI's normal map creator, it comes out all studdery in a way? Maybe its the settings, but i have messed with them and nothing occured.

Any suggestions?


G0st

[Riccard]

First you need to render the normalmap! You've done that right? 'transfer surface'
If you have done that you'll get a normalmap texture. This is the one you should have as source (out color) in a 'file' node - texture node.

It's this point that is wrong - 3. Selected MMB-Drag Phong 2 over to Phong 1

What you have done now is connect the high-res mesh shader to the 'normal camera' of the lowres. Look over earlier mentioned note again, what you need to do is connect a single freestanding texture 'file' node (that you load the normalmap into) to the low-res 'normal camera'.

The rest of the setup is correct.

Hope this explains it a bit better. Good luck

[G0st]

Thats where i went wrong, i didnt render the normal map! Sorry im pestering you but Transfer Surface, thats a maya command? Where could i find this? Once i get this normal mapping things once im sure ill be fine from here on out. If what i understand, could i use the normal map from ATI's generator? Im not too sure how to generate a NormalMap via Maya...

When you say:

'transfer surface'
If you have done that you'll get a normalmap texture. This is the one you should have as source (out color) in a 'file' node - texture node.

Do you mean in the phong material atturbutes select Color/File/NormalMap.jpg ?
then in the "Textures" part of the hypershade i find this node and its THAT that i MMB SHIFt drag over?
or is there something im completely fu***ng up?

Im actually quite lost, and i appreciate all your help you have no idea! I wont dissapoint you with this weapon!!

[G0st]

Ok well i managed to get Transfer Surface and the normals created, but now my normal map looks really weird and its not showing all the detail properly, anyone....

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/NormalMap.jpg

[EarthQuake]

Looks fine to me, unless you expect it to fake depth which a normal map does not do... Hmmm actually it dosent look like its smothing correctly, looks like theres some banding going on there. I've only used ORB and the lightwave plugin so i wouldnt know how to help you with maya and ati's tool.

[G0st]

Out of curiosity, does the Low poly and High poly model have to be overlapped when you normal map them? Like a bounding box kinda way?

[ROPA]

It's ofcourse better to place them in same position because generating normalmaps is depending on this , normalmaps are working like normal raytrace from lowmesh face to highmesh surface and rendering results on the lowmesh normal texture

I'm working now a lot on this and all I can say ORB is the best one , because of transfering textures too
In Maya painting textures with normalmaps turned on is not handy way to create good textures with all details included on normalmaps

[EarthQuake]

Yeah orb not only exports a normal map but a displacement map(not that you would really ned it) and a color map of your high poly model's surface colors which is very usefull.

[G0st]

Ok i have a f ew questions, i got ahold of ORB and it works wonders, but i still seem to have a few problems

1 My image map is 1024 by 512, how do i change to lets say 1024 1024 or 512 512
when in orb and after the normal map has been made i look at (tild~) and the 3dot model looks weird? like all the textures are blurry and not so nice. Here are the High and Low res model (its not finished) The uvmap, Normal map and how it looks in orb

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/normals.jpg
http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/highlow.jpg
http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/uvmap.jpg

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/orb.jpg

(i knnow the normals are reversed on the other thing, ill fix that. I think it looks like that because i have a Geforce 4 ti 4200, doesnt support per pixel (i think, melody didnt let me open it up because of my card)

Anyone able to help

[ROPA]

here ORB starts to have other problem or U can say stragne solution
Resolution of Your ma is based on resolution U open ORB (start ini)

The other think about normalmaps is that UV have to be perfect :) , best way to check it is to put some big noise texture and look for streeched parts
Other think is to have very smooth high object , ofcourse obj have to be triangulated

other trick to reverse normal maps is to invert in photoshop Rchannel and Gchannel
Maya and ORB are generating different

Yours normals look's bad because of settings in orb , read help carefuly

or , do the normals in MAYA :)

[AlecMoody]

Ghost:
I think the low poly version of the famas grip looks much better. The real gun has hard lines on it and the smoothed one looks awkward.

[EarthQuake]

Your car supports pixel shaders just not pixelshader version 2.0(which melody needs) for that you need a geforce fx series card or i think a raedon 9600 or better. The low poly model right now wont really benifit from the normal map you're trying to do because you high poly model is simply a sub-divided low poly model. You should make you high poly from scratch or atleast put a lot more care into that just sub-dividing it. Also your low poly still has way too much detail in in.

[G0st]

well i didnt end up going with a normal map, as i stopped that project for now. This is a famas at 4000 tris with 1 1024 skin, tell me whatcha think?

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/FamasC.jpg

[G0st]

well no one replied to that, i hope its not TOO bad.
Anyhow heres an update on what i have been working on

Beretta model Currently at 3000 tris with little left to model and optimizations left to do

http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/beretta.jpg
(the normals are wacked because of import from maya to max

wire
http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/berettawire.jpg
Also here are some arms which i made, note this is my first time ever really skinning organic and modling hands/arms

tri count is 3700 (im trying to figure to lower it)
http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/armswire.jpg
http://www.frag-ops.com/g0st/arms.jpg

[katzeimsack]

very nice!

[NickBFTD]

I had a program just last year (lost it by reinstalling windows) that enables you to emulate a number of functions of modern graphics cards (its intended for use with games), i only had a geforce 2 at the time and was able to run Nvidia's melody, the only problem is that i no longer have the program (got new card) and i cant remember the name of it either but it is out there.............somewhere.

[EarthQuake]

Yeah i remember using something similar to get the doom3 alpha to run on my geforce1 GTS. I think i found it here but just keep in mind software emulation is VERY VERY slow. Heres the link: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html

Also i think you have about 1-2000 too many triangles in that pistol, just because people make insanely high poly weapons for counter-strike replacements dosent mean its either a smart thing to do nor necassry to get a good looking model.

[NickBFTD]

Well thats not actually the program i had, but it is most likely a lot better being from a major company like Nvidia.

[EarthQuake]

Yeah i think the program i did it with was riva tuner, but its the exact same thing just changes some registry settings that have been in the nvidia drivers for a long time.

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