Unvanquished Forum

I think we should restore or modify a few asset changes that we have made in the past:

• Trapper texture
• Acid tube texture
• Muzzleflashes
• Certain particle effects (luci, etc)

The generated normal maps on the guns are really bad. They looked cool at first but right now they all look like plastic to me.

That's not the normalmaps, that's the specmap. You just need to tone those down.

Can you make a new set, then?

Unlikely. I'm not good at this type of thing. I can tell someone how to do it though.

Okay. We'll need to include that in the pak file for this release. We also need to include the grenade spec map fix. I can contribute a few good color grading strips that people can use for testing.

What do you mean by modifying some of the particle effects? Like, you want a new luci ball? The current one actually looks fairly decent with bloom on, but otherwise yeah, it's pretty bad.

it looks awkward. I've seen better luci effects by trem people in graphic mods.

Ishq wrote:

That's not the normalmaps, that's the specmap. You just need to tone those down.

Oh, it's both. It sure as hell is both; I can tell by the pixels. (No, really, I can tell just by looking at the normal map itself that it's bad.)

The problem lies in the approach. The normal maps were created using greyscale images in CrazyBump, and the result is going to be about the same as what you would get with a bump map (because CrazyBump is basically just creating normals from greyscale images in much the same way), and so the result does not match the expectation (e.g., you don't get as well-defined "edges"). Plus, there's pitfalls to trying to slap a normal map on a model that has not been unwrapped for one; for example, you really ought to pull islands apart from each other where there are sharp edges to avoid artifacts—except, well, there's not really any sharp edges on those normals so the edges look rounded, adding to the plastic-y look.

For the past few days I have been writing an article to address these and other common issues, as well as to provide an overview of graphical features and all that stuff. Not sure by when I will finish it, however.

I put together some quick muzzle flash replacements for the rifle and chaingun.

Here's the result of more experimenting.