(Before I begin, I must stress that this is my own work and there may be inaccuracies. Complaints do not affect your statutary rights. Advice unsuitable for children less than 3 years old due to small parts.)
Hello.
The Plasma docs are not that good about normal maps, and I also think it does not include that specular intensity maps are also possible. I think. So I decided to correct it all here so that people searching about these issues will know in the future:
NORMAL MAPS (aka the blue ones with the weird colours)
Cyan refers to these maps as "bump maps". This is a misnomer. Chogon's collection of Cyan's documentation is unforunately out of date here, as it does not require the ~~~ trick on a Plasma Standard material (although to be fair to Chogon this still works!) - as you may have spotted, there is a Plasma Bumpmap material that has replaced this. From my own experimentation, normal maps only really come into their own on stuff that is moving. As a rookie, I'm not sure if this is normal in all 3d stuff or just that Plasma doesn't implement normal maps that well.
Anywho, to get a normal map on ALL (not just animated stuff), you're going to need to do this:
1) Set up your base texture or textures as the lowest layers of a Plasma Multipass material.
2) Your top layer should be a Plasma Bumpmap material.
3) Put your normal map in this material's bump layer, just as you would a normal texture. You probably will want to mess around with the intensity, but I'm not sure exactly how intensity affects the appearence of your map in game.
4) Apply a ForceRTLight component, if your object will not normally be lit by RT lighting (IE it is static.)
SPECULAR MAPS
If you did the above, you might have noticed that the Plasma Bumpmap material has a little checkbox which says "Specular Bump Map". As far as I can tell, this option turns your bump map into something that blends specular light (reflected light that bounces off your RT light if your RT light has it's specular option on and that specular option isn't black) onto the texture according to how white the map is - the whiter the map, the more specular light that is applied to that region. Why is this useful, you might ask? Well, it basically adds texture to specular lighting, which means that it doesn't look like the specular lighting the user sees is bouncing off a completely flat surface. This really adds to the graphical effect of runtime lighting. You DO need specular switched on on the base textures if you tick that box, AFAIK.
I'd appreciate if I could get some feedback on this. RT effects like the above are my favourite thing about the Max plugin.
EDIT: At the moment, however, I'm getting strange glitchiness with both specular and normal maps. Not sure of the cause as of yet.
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