Naming conventions for textures?

[Clueless Newbie]

I poked around in the Nex textures and couldn't find what I was looking for, so I decided to make my own. I've done that for other third party games before, so why not Nex too, eh?

But I see there are several types of textures here. Besides the basic colourmap, there are also glowmaps, bumpmaps, normmaps, glossmaps, and... more? Transparency maps, perhaps?

What are the naming conventions for these? Do I just stick _gloss or _glow behind the respective maps and that's it? Will that automagically make them work? Or do I have to add a script that specifically states that so and so texture is the glow/gloss/whatever map for so and so texture?

Also, why both bumpmaps and norm maps? Does Nexuiz use whichever is present or did somebody forget to remove the bumpmaps from the texture folder?

[tZork]

_glow, _gloss, _bump and _norm automagicaly makes their respective effect work. Some other things like transparency is done with shader scripts. afaik there is no other way to tell the engine yo use bitmap x as bump for texture y, so id suggest you stick with this naming convention

To take full advantage of _bump / _norm textures you should compile you map with the -deluxe flag in the light stage.

[Clueless Newbie]

_glow, _gloss, _bump and _norm automagicaly makes their respective effect work.

Oh, goody. No messing with scripts.

To take full advantage of _bump / _norm textures you should compile you map with the -deluxe flag in the light stage.

Does it make any difference whether one uses _bump or _norm? Same result?

[KadaverJack]

Does it make any difference whether one uses _bump or _norm? Same result?

No, of course not. Normal maps should look far better than bumpmaps (esp with offset-/reliefmapping enabled). According to the darkplaces readme, the engine ignores bumpmaps if normalmaps are present.

[Morphed]

Does it make any difference whether one uses _bump or _norm? Same result?

if you wanna use only bumpmap then use _bump but if you have normal map then use _norm and place bumpmap (heightmap) into _norm.tga alpha channel

Normal maps should look far better than bumpmaps (esp with offset-/reliefmapping enabled).

afaik normalmaps are not used for offset/relif mapping

[tZork]

iirc the engine even turns bump maps into normal maps internally. So first making a bump map and turning it into a normal map with some filter is proly not to usefull.

[Strahlemann]

Normal maps should look far better than bumpmaps (esp with offset-/reliefmapping enabled).

Not exactly.
Normalmaps look better if you have just deluxemapping enabled, but as there's no accurate depth-information stored in the normal-maps, they do not work with offset-/reliefmapping.

So if you want to have your textures look good with offset/reliefmapping you should use a _bump texture, but as most people won't play with offsetmapping enabled you should stick to the better looking normalmaps for deluxemapping only.

It's a pity that Darkplaces can't use the normalmaps for lighting and the bump for offsetmapping, instead it chooses normalmaps over bumpmaps if there's one.

[Strahlemann]

Okay, images explain better:



Here you can clearly see the sharper and better lighting of dynamic lights on textures that use a normalmap (additional _norm texture)



Here it's visible how the bump-map enables the offsetting giving the impression of a really 3-dimensional surface. That does not work as soon as you use a normalmap, cause Darkplaces doesn't use the _bump texture if there's a _norm texture.
Don't ask me why

So atm it's the best to make both _norm and _bump texture.
If you're too lazy i'd suggest that you stick to normalmaps, because the performance with offsetmapping enabled is still very bad and even gives some kind of "shifting"-effect on the textures which looks bad on the edges of brushes.

[Clueless Newbie]

Okay, images explain better:

That they did.

So atm it's the best to make both _norm and _bump texture.
If you're too lazy i'd suggest that you stick to normalmaps, because the performance with offsetmapping enabled is still very bad and even gives some kind of "shifting"-effect on the textures which looks bad on the edges of brushes.

Well, I use bumpmaps to make my normalmaps, so I suppose I might as well include both.