Paradox wrote:It's all DOT3 faked bumpmapping, so it's still a flat surface. If viewed from an angle, it will be pretty noticeable.
Yes. Without parallax mapping, it's an expected limitation of normal mapping. Poor choice of wording on my part with 'flat'.
I was more trying to convey the fact that even when viewed perpendicular to the surface, Plasma's implementation just doesn't create a good illusion of extra detail to the surface, or even look all that visually appealing.
Probably because it's not per pixel. I guess maybe 'dull' would be a better word. It looks more like someone's impression of a shadow drawn on the surface with a pencil rather then actual bumps and cracks in the object responding to light (convincingly).
Paradox wrote:I have not seen it play well with envmaps.
So far I have not encountered that personally. I haven't tried with a dynamic envmap, but putting a pre-render envmap layer on top of the normal map layer has worked for me. Could you elaborate on what problems you've seen it cause?
Tsar Hoikas wrote:This is a great resource-thanks for taking the time to make it! I'm amused that it looks like something you'd buy from the epic games store for Unreal. When I tried to export it for MOUL, blender crashed, but maybe that's something with my blender install.
You are welcome!
I'm trying to get setup on the Destiny shard so I can test ages with MOUL. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I will see if I can replicate it once I get up and running.
*****
It's likely unrelated to whatever is causing trouble for you, but its worth mentioning that I have been experiencing quite a few crashes during export after I started working with bump mapping (for the material age).
Crashing was pretty rare before. Now it seems pretty common (seems more frequent when I make changes)
The majority of them would happen immediately after the bake lighting stage. I would frequently see:
Exporting 'KormanMaterials.age'
Baking Static Lighting...
Preparing to bake...
...
128 Vertex Color(s) [H:72688A5C9C0588F5]
And Blender would crash immediately after that. Then sometimes it would get past that and be processing objects and then randomly crash there instead.
And as I was writing this blender nearly locked up my machine as it was generating the mip maps for the normal map for maybe 30 seconds until it spit out an access violation message and crashed.
Maybe cached or temporary generate files are causing trouble? Not sure. Just something to be aware of if anyone else is trying out bump mapping.