I tried to make a self-illuminating (glow) map, a normal (bump) map, and a specular map using the original as a template. I found some techniques and tools that were quite effective and so I made a walkthrough to share.

Making the glow map:
With glow maps, all non-black pixels will show up, even in dark or no lighting, this works well for giving star ships the bright windows/glowing nacelles effect.

If you have a version of the texture with layers then it's as easy as lifting the layers with the glows off and putting them onto a black background. But don't worry if you haven't got layers, here's a technique
via the histogram.

First we raise the Shadows slider to above the majority of the input in the RGB channel, effectively discarding everything except the most brightly lit areas. Then we examine the texture, and note which areas need to glow more, ie. the nacelles, so we switch to the blue channel and move the Midtones (middle) slider to just before the huge spike of blue. The nacells glow more, but we have shifted the other hues inadvertently too.



The final step is then to correct the colours. The light cone at the bottom of the texture should be orangey-yellow. Look up the RGB additive colour model and you can see that to shift red to yellow, we need to inject more green. So switch to the green channel, and move the Midtones slider to just before the huge spike of green. Ta-da! a yellow looking light. As a bonus, it gave the nacelle glow more definition.



Select and de-saturize any glows that we want to be white and add your finishing touches and then we have the final glow map.



Here's the original texture I worked with.


Here's a before...

...and after.


Much better normal map to come next.

A normal map adds an illusion of depth to textures. It doesn't actually alter geometry but rather affects the shading over a surface. Normal maps can alter the direction a surface appears to be facing. The normal for each pixel is defined by storing transformation data in the RGB channels, with the intensity of mapping stored in the alpha channel.

A very fast way to produce a good quality normal map is to download CrazyBump. This application takes in your original texture and outputs a normal map according to parameters that you can tweak. There is even a very handy preview allowing you to see your changes instantaneously, all in a very easy to use package. I'm surprised (and thankful) that it doesn't cost money.

Making normal maps with CrazyBump:
For the Vulcan D'kyr-class, I wanted it to have a relatively smooth hull except for some depth where there are lines, and no mapping at the glows. To do this, I outputed one normal map with parameters that were good for the hull and the lines, another with no mapping, so it was blank and light blue, and then simply layered it over the blank, and deleted the glow areas.

The preview lets you load the actual mesh, although only the COLLADA format (.dae) imported successfully for me, and even then the texture coordinates were messed up, it still helped a lot as the effect is most noticeable when you rotate a light around it. Here's the preview screen and the final normal map used.


Here's another before...


...and after.

sleek! good stuff here strings .

Interesting, i ll try crazy bup defenetly

Wow!

I'm still not sure what you mean by "channels", but as i'm not making this stuff i'll leave you to your good work. I'm still used to just editing images with MS Paint anyways - and I use Irfanview if I want to make them fancy.

Nice work there strings!

For specular maps I just followed this guide to transform a normal map into a specular map. It makes surfaces that are flat more shiny than surfaces that are wrinkly.

Thanks. That is very helpful. I saved the glow maps when I used someone else's downloaded model. It does seam that they are defined as the glow map in different ways depending on the software. Perhaps our combat engine will set a naming conversion for us?

I think adding a "i" or "_i" suffix is the way BOTF indicated that a particular file is the self-illuminating map. I've seen other models in our sharepoint that follow that convention already, so let's stick with that? For bump maps, I've seen adding a "b" or "_b" suffix is common, and it's a logical choice. That leaves specular maps, which I think adding an "s" or "_s" suffix is good.

Oh, I found out that CrazyBump will eventually cost money =( damn. But it is free for now, during this beta test period. A free alternative (and will likely stay free) is to use Nvidia's Normal map generation plugins for Photoshop. But that tool does not create a normal map from your diffuse texture, it's meant to be used with a height map.


I didn't explain normal maps very well, partly cause I didn't want an intro that was too long, and partly cause CrazyBump was so easy to use that I thought I could just skip a lot of the technical information Well, basically, all of those crazy blue, pink, and green colours in a normal map are surface normal information but they're encoded as colour information, in the Red, Blue and Green channels. When CrazyBump costs money I'll make my normal maps another way, and I'll try and make an example where I actually use normal maps for high poly detail. All in good time.

Nice!, you don't have a copy of the ship and textures by chance do you?

Regards Wolfe

I tested the .3ds in Ultimate Unwrap but it doesn't load the other 3 textures, just the diffuse. You'll have to open the .max with 3DS Max (or gMax).

PS - I played around with the glow map a bit more, so you might find some differences with the one I posted above.

Nice.

The single letter would be best. Some programs restrict the number of characters in a texture name. If you used the _glow format it would be harder to name files.

Yep I've noticed that too. Cool, single letters then it is.

I've stickied this thread. I've got no idea why it wasn't already!

All modellers should follow the above advice when making models. Please add to the advice if you have any.

If your looking to create bump/ Normal maps, Nvidia has an awesome plugin for photoshop http://developer.nvidia.com/object/phot ... ugins.html. Its fantastic just load your diffuse map run the plugin and it will craete bump/normal map

There is a better way to make HEIGHTMAPS - you can use them as bump maps OR you can use those heightmaps in CrazyBump and it will generate normal maps (far better ones).

The trick is to create a new layer and than using blue trace all lines and detail on the hull (texture) that is supposed to be indented - things like seams, holes, windows, etc..
then use the read color to trace everything that should be extruded a bit.

Now select the background, create a new layer and paint it grey. Delete the background image (original texture). You should be left with the gray layer and the layer with the blue/red shapes. Switch to grayscale, save and impšort into Crazybump and let it do it's work.

End effect gives you something like this:



There's a small tutorial in this thread:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index. ... 854.0.html

If this works, and all the modellers know how to do it, then we will need to make sure all the models are done with the same texture files etc. We don't want to end up with a situation where some ships are missing their lighting textures whilst others lack damage textures. Making sure everything is the same now will help to avoid problems further down the line.

I was not even aware there was a plan for damage textures...
Glow map is a good idea considering the project! The engine is supposed to take then into account?

Some of the models I have converted to our game came with damage textures and texture_i glow maps but not all. We could go back and add these maps to ships that lack them or remove them from the models that do depending on what the game engine will do.

We did decide to use the naming format texture and texturei for glow maps removing the "_" to save space for the .3ds file constraints. The format texture_i for glow is used in most of the files I have downloaded from Star Trek games but .3ds limits a file name to eight characters. Removing the "_" saves space. That was for the Windows XP combat engine. I do not know what will happen in the XNA version of our combat engine.

I have added glow to some of the models I built. The glow and damage are easy maps to make but there are a lot of models. I have not yet tried to make any of the other special maps. It would be best to wait on the combat engine to see what to do.

okay thanks!
anyway I have to redo all the mesh of the romulan fleetyard as it is not a quality mesh that can easily be unwraped, so it will take more time than anticipated!
I would strongly suggest everyone to save in the .obj format so it can be easily transfered without problems from a 3D program to another, keeping the unwrap infos alive etc.

And I did not see if you all use edit mesh instead of edit poly, but since it's what I got on the model of the fleetyard, I must insist that edit poly is really the way to go for todays games... its easier to unwrap manually, divides all 'sqwares' in triangles automatically, gets you better shades results most of the time etc... plus, I saw many 4 and a few 5 siders (4s that looked like they were some arrow or something, NOT GOOD) in your edit mesh anyway and those things will look like crap once they get in the engine... most engines would really be better off with 3(if needed)-4(for the most part) siders anyway.

Just to share my point of view in order to maximize the results in this promising game, **not to bash on anyone**, since some of you dont have any real 3D formation. I really encourage self-learning and that is why I pointed out this problem.

Hope it helps with future modeling.

Thanks for the observations. That Romulan Fleetyard mesh was made by Trashman. He is not around anymore to take the advice. The Klingon Fleetyard mesh was made by him as well so we may need to start from scratch when we get around to it.

I'm looking forward to see final result on trashamn's bases. It's nice to have you in the team Zeusqc