Hi Timo,
Thanks, experimenting away. I might have given the wrong URL for
XNORMAL. Should be:
www.xnormal.net
Cheers
Aidan
At 12:22 05/06/2007, you wrote:
You'd be better off using 16 or 32 bit bump/displacement maps: they
don't need a shifty material to be used in RS and, as the name says,
they can be used for displacement. I just don't know if the mentioned
programs can create displacement maps.
For using highpoly models in RS, import them as trisets. Trisets
render considerably faster than sds poly models and are lighter all
around. As for the difference between bump and normal maps, a bump map
has actual height information in it, while a normal map only has the
generated normal. So in essence, you can create a normal map from a
bump map, but you can't create a bump map from a normal map.
On 05/06/07, Aidan O Driscoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the reply. Yes - later - after sending this mail and some
discussion at the IRC - the conclusion arrived at is that Normal
Maps, as you said, are glorified bump maps, but the difference is
Bump maps use greyscale to generate the bump levels while Normal maps
use RGB. I must try and investigate the XNORMAL app in between
Blender/Silo and Realsoft. What Xnormal seems to do is create one of
these Normal maps by taking two obj versions of the mesh. A low poly
version and the high poly version. From these it creates a normal
map. As to how this works or understanding same - me dont understand yet :)
So again - why is this all of interest? The above is used
considerably in the gaming industry it seems. AND for RS at the
moment which [ I think ] has problems shifting large poly counts, its
a way of getting sculpted models into an RS scene with low overhead.
AND for free as both Xnormal and Blender ARE Free.
Cheers
Aidan
At 05:37 05/06/2007, you wrote:
>I'm no guru on this, but a normal map is a texture that defines a
>surface normal via color.
>A surface normal is the vector (a three dimensional direction) that
>points away from a surface. In rendering you use this vector to
>evaluate how much light any given area on an object reflects, and in
>which direction. By mapping a normal map to a surface you can
>artificially influence these normal vectors, and thus give an object a
>lot more detail in the rendering phase, that is not really there in
>geometry. Thus it renders fairly quickly, too. I may be wrong on this,
>but to me a normal map is a shortcut from a displacement map, since
>the later must be evaluated to generate normals, while the first
>already defines them by itself...
>hope that helped explain this technology some more.
>
>Daniel
>
>On 6/4/07, Aidan O Driscoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>AND - Just came across this:
>>
>>http://sv3.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77037
>>
>
>
>
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