Another bumpmapping Disaster

[Forboding Angel]

I'm so mad at this point that.. ungh nevermind


Look. I need this bumpmap:



to be applied to this texture:



with no high res blend, and a regular blend mode of 0.4

Simple right? WRONG!

The wiki refers to a section of the climate editor that allows you to set the blends, but, SUPRISE! It's not there. Which means I am screwed. Combine that with the fact that atm I can't even import my heightmap at 1:1 ratios any more (the perlin noise looks quite bad in spring. I must have everything at 1:1 ratios) because l3dt decides not to apply any bumpmapping at all when I do that.

So I had a little fun today. rendered a light map with normal settings as per Greenworld climate. Went and changed the weighting to 100 on all land types. Then I proceeded to change all the bump map totals to 100.

Shocker. No change whatsoever (This is using 2.4b btw).

I'm getting really really tired of spending 8 hours trying to figure this stuff out on my own. I feel 100% gimped. As you can see, the normal above is VERY agressive. If the bumpmapping in the texture is to survive the dds compression in the spring compiler it Has to be very agressive. However, Now I have lost all control over the blend of the bumpmap when seems to be working at some arbitrary setting which may be just peachy keen for other renderers...

Also, without doing the heightmap at a 1:1 ratio, the texture gets completely garbled. For what it is it looks great, but if you wanted to keep the original detail in the texture, you're screwed unless you do a render at 1:1. I have no problem with that, however, I need to be able to control the bumpmapping completely . Unfortunately I don't have that ability any more and messing around with this stuff is frankly, quite infuriating.




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Ok I did some testing and found out some interesting results.

THis is the light map processed without bumpmapping:


And this is processed with Bumpmapping:


Do you understand now why I'm upset? They are the same! The exact same! BTW this was with a bump-map- totals of 500 on each land type and a weight of 60 on the bumpmapping.

Would you please tell me what is going on? Cause atm I'm really really upset and I apologize for the tone of this post. All this time after you posted my climate fixed for me, I had thought it was fixed, even though the bumpmapping wasn't really showing up, I was willing to live with it. All this time it was the terrain normals tricking me.

Well, I'mma pop a few alkaseltzer and have a good cry. Will check back later today.

Thanks for listening to me rant.

[Aaron]

Shit, I'm sorry for not fixing this sooner. I've reproduced the bug and I'll upload a fix later tonight.

The work around right now is to apply bump-mapping directly to the normals map (there's an 'apply bump mapping' check in the normals map wizard too.) That definitely works for 1:1.

I'm very sorry for the heartache, headache (or heartburn?) caused by this bug.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[Aaron]

Uploading now...

..and we're done. Version 2.4.2.20 is the one you want.

[Aaron]

Also, without doing the heightmap at a 1:1 ratio, the texture gets completely garbled. For what it is it looks great, but if you wanted to keep the original detail in the texture, you're screwed unless you do a render at 1:1.

Ah, I understand the 1:1 thing now (it took long enough). Spring's texture compressor, or the converter, or whatever, is doing a size optimisation. Am I full of it, or did I read that somewhere a while ago? Anyway, if so, the high-res textures that I so like need to be compressed more than 1:1 textures because they're more detailed and varied, and thus the extra compression shitcans the quality.

That's why I could never understand the problem; I never tested a map in Spring. High-res textures always look better in other renderers, because they don't do that optimisation.

Anyway, that's my theory. Please tell me this is a well-documented feature of Spring and I should have known this already.

[Forboding Angel]

oh thank you. Thankyou thank you thanbkyou!!!!


Well you are pretty much right about the spring compiler.

What it does is it breakes me map into a bunch of tiles that get converted to dds, it looks to repeat wherever it can, so the less detailed your textures are, the more crappy they look in the end result.

For example, at one point I had to use 0 compression in the compiler becauxse it kept erasing the dotted lines in a street.

Our SM3 format, is light years ahead of the SM2, but imo, SM3 is not ready for mass consumption yet.


And no this is not well documented. Hell nothing in spring is well documented

Thanks for listening to be rant and rave

[Forboding Angel]

works beautifully. Thank you!