Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I make weapons, and anytime I actually use the normal map, it's way too shiny. I edit the alpha on the _n map to put what's shiny and what's not, but it doesn't work. I've just thought of something, and I bet it's the color in the main channel, not the alpha that decides if it's shiny, bumpy, ect, but I've looked at some of oblivion's weapons normals, and I don't know how to make that color effect.


If you want, take a look at one of my weapon textures and tell me what I should do with it.
http://www.miriscusltd.com/Oblivion/gutrender.dds
http://www.miriscusltd.com/Oblivion/gutrender_n.dds


(even though this is obvious, I'll post a picture anyway just to extend the length of the thread and show off my most recent work.)

This is, of course, what it looks like without correct normals.

Well to get the normal map you need the plugin for photoshop (that is if you have photoshop..its what I have) you can get it here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photo...ugins.html

hope that helps...it adds a filter to photoshop that makes a color channel like whats in your current normal map, and makes it into a normal map. Also you can use this to just save a normal map from an existing texture. Just click the normal map box in the Nvidia UI that pops up when you save the file and check the "Convert to Tangent Space Normal Map" checkbox. Leave everything else the same...but change the file type at the top of the box to DTX5 and save it as "youritem_n.dds" like you already did. Then it should work.

I got it all working the way I wanted. I'll leave this thread open though.

Cool. Good to see you got it working. :goodjob:

There's also a GIMP plug-in if anyone wants to know.

Once, while out googling for tutorials on normal mapping, I came across a .max scene on the net which had set up lighting and other things exactly right so that you could put an object in the scene, render it, and get a working normal map from the render. Of course, it assumed you had modelled a version of the object to be extremely high-quality otherwise the normal map wouldn't have done anything. I wish I'd bookmarked that page.

[Normal Mapping and it's Importance]

Basically everything you need to know about Photoshop normal mapping. It has a link to a tutorial as well, which I found most helpful.