Sharper looking textures (detail textures?)

[Taiyo.uk]

I see you or someone else have used MapZone. :p

Those look like TRaK's textures, which were done in PS.

[divVerent]

Well, the other problem is that it applies the same detail texture to all surfaces. This makes it look even worse, e.g. on the weapon models. And I see no way to fix that other than by really implementing secondary tcmods.

[Lee_Stricklin]

@ divVerent

Wow you weren't joking. It seems that the only way to make a "detailed" textures option is if their were an overlay created for EVERY SINGLE TEXTURE IN THE GAME. That would definitely be time consuming, a bitch to code (I think, I'm no coder), and probably give everybody's PCs a swift kick in the ass on performance. Detailed texture options like that probably are only good in games that try to look insanely realistic and would without a doubt after seeing that screenie throw the art-style off.

[Sanne]

The same detail texture on every surface doesn't make much sense to me either.

I always thought individual detail textures can be applied to a surface by the mapper, not every surface gets the same detail texture, and only on surfaces where it makes sense, and where players can get close to. At least that's what I would want to do if I would map.

It would be nice if the engine supported two different texture coordinate sets and could blend the two textures, so the mapper could have detail textures if wanted. Looking at this post from divVerent it seems this is planned anyway?

I'm a long time Blender user, mostly rendering stills, but I'm fascinated by realtime 3D and it's visual possibilities, that's why this topic caught my interest. But I haven't yet learned much about Darkplaces' possibilities and it's supported Q3 shader options, or mapping in general, so I hope I don't talk nonsense.

[MirceaKitsune]

I don't agree with detail textures being compiled into the .bsp, I think they are best as a dynamically rendered feature. However there should be a smart way to define detail textures to many textures via scripts, so one won't have to specify each single texture the detail applies to in shaders (that would be a very long list).

My idea was defining detail textures via shaders but allowing a detail to be applied over an entire folder (every texture in that folder), in the form of "gfx/details/metaldetail1 { ... 'applies to' textures/evil1_metals textures/evil2_metals and-every-other-folder-containing-metal-textures }, but div said he disagrees with this idea.

[divVerent]

We don't have a free texture unit for global detail textures on many widespread GPUs - we'd have to use the one used for texture blending (or some other feature) anyway.

Which is why I suggest doing detail textures as a case of texture blending.

Also, they would NOT be compiled in the map! q3map2 does not do shader stage processing. Also, to be able to dynamically enable the second shader stage, one could have a shader keyword that makes the shader stage depend on whether a cvar is set or not.

What I also want is pattern rules for shaders, so you can e.g. write:

textures/foo/*
{
surfaceparm nonsolid
}

and it will make ALL textures in foo/ nonsolid. This can not work for all shader features, but for some, and if we are VERY lucky, this could be used to add a detail texture shader stage. Even if not, we could make an "autodetail" cvar that makes all one-stage shaders two-stage shaders with a detail texture.

[MirceaKitsune]

Yes, there's no reason why specifying something to all textures in a folder shouldn't work for any shader property, so one can easily make the folder have the chosen properties in one line

I'm wondering about something. Suppose one wants to specify the scaling, strength and / or distance of detail textures from cvars, could a shader use cvars for different values? eg: textures\evil1_metals\* { tcBlend gfx/detail/metaldetail1 , tcBlend intensity cvar("cl_detailtexture_intensity"), tcBlent distance cvar("cl_detailtexture_distance"), etc.

Of course a possibility for any shader property, if anyone would want to make a shader value be a given cvar. For instance with such a feature, one could locally colorize a logo on a wall to each user's HUD color

[divVerent]

There is no distance setting for detail textures in my screenshots. The distance fading is done how it should be - using mipmapping only.

And there ARE good reasons why it can't be done per-directory right now, but that goes too far into engine details...

[tZork]

detail textures (the way i know them) can already be done in dp, to some extent. what you do is use a large scale rough "colour map" for texture and a normal map with the fine detail.



The cave here is we cant scale the normals and the colour map individually, so the gain of detail maps (to save memory) is more or less lost. If what your looking for is sharper textures, "all" you have to do is create higher res textures (and often scale them smaller in radiant).

The way i would like to see, to overcome this is letting mappers specify normals and other extra maps in the shader script. Perhaps this would also free up more texture units as i imagine it would be up to the mapper to make sure it wont use more then available.

Code: Select all

textures/bla/blabla-v1
{
   qer_editorimage textures/bla/blabla_qei

   q3map_shadeangle 120
   surfaceparm nomarks
   
   dp_normaldepth 4

   {
      map textures/bla/blabla_dark
   }

   {
      normalmap textures/bla/noisemap
      tcMod scale 0.1 0.1
   }
}


I don't know how (un)realistic it is to code a feature like this for dp, but personally i think it would help a good bit for getting nexuiz content to the next level.

[Flying Steel]

detail textures (the way i know them) can already be done in dp, to some extent. what you do is use a large scale rough "colour map" for texture and a normal map with the fine detail.

If I am understanding you and your visual examples correctly, the problem with this is that you also want large scale normal map detail and small scale diffuse and specular/gloss detail.

So I think it still comes down to main normal/bump maps lossing opaqueness to detail normal/bump maps as the camera approaches the surface and the main color maps losing opaqueness to detail color maps as the camera approaches the surface.

Or. . .

We on the art side just have to make really high resolution detailed textures for the players with GPUs that can handle them (which will eventually be all of us, let's keep in mind), while project coders improve the game's graphics by instead tackling the archaic character model/animation limitations.