Railworks America

in the process of doing the D&RGW F9, i noticed an omission in the bump map. With my limited skills and some cut and paste, I was able to edit and move the louvers on the side around and add the one in front of the window that was missing. Now it's far closer to the early series F9s.



To update your F9 graphics, download the following .rar file;

http://mdroaming.home.comcast.net/F9_Bump.rar

It includes two files. Open your F9 engine\textures folder, rename the two matching files, then copy these into the folder to update the textures. You will have to be careful to make any 'rivets' layers invisible before saving your repaint texture files, as they don't match the new pattern at all and look odd.

Unfortunately... that's not how bumpmaps work. What they do is use specific colours to encode the direction of normals ( which the 3d engine converts into a type of shading that makes the surface look bumpy ), which means you do actually need the specific colours provided by the Nvidia converter plugins. They take an image with height data encoded as the brightness of a pixel as a source, so if you want a flat raised panel, it is just a strip of lighter colour, no shading.

Anyway to demo I attempted to convert the F9 bumpmap - which is less than ideal because it has shading, but it's just a rough example. Top to bottom:

* Source
* Converted to input for the plugin, not ideal
* Output of the Nvidia bumpmap plugin.

Ideally in the source to the bumpmap generator the base colour would be 50% grey, the panel seams on the E9 would be say, 75% grey, and the rivets little white dots.

Kali wrote:Unfortunately... that's not how bumpmaps work. What they do is use specific colours to encode the direction of normals ( which the 3d engine converts into a type of shading that makes the surface look bumpy ), which means you do actually need the specific colours provided by the Nvidia converter plugins. They take an image with height data encoded as the brightness of a pixel as a source, so if you want a flat raised panel, it is just a strip of lighter colour, no shading.

Then you are also implying that when ever you repaint something you should regenerate the bumpmap, correct?

No no, only when you change the actual model, unless you somehow have bumpy paint! all it does is change the angle the game engine thinks the surface is at ( very basically ). You can pretend it's part of the mesh, because technically it is, just rather easier to edit :)

So its a bit of a misleading when the rivet and other layers to build the bump are included as part of a repainting template, since repainting and bumps don't really affect each other. It would be safer to simply copy those layers to their own PSD.

Or am I still missing something?

Oddly, those are the original supplied bump maps, with minor edits, no changes in color or shading, just copying and moving things. They appear on the model properly.

PapaXpress wrote:So its a bit of a misleading when the rivet and other layers to build the bump are included as part of a repainting template, since repainting and bumps don't really affect each other. It would be safer to simply copy those layers to their own PSD.

Or am I still missing something?

I am beginning to understand that the 'rivet' layers in mr Cowen's kit say, are more there as painting guides than anything else. I am hiding them before saving my reskins and letting the furnished bump maps define the rivet lines and so on. The best example is the MP1500DC. There are two different 'rivet' layers, and neither lines up with the furnished bump maps. This makes for a choppy and odd looking skin.

Use the rivet layer to make the bumpmap. Ditch any shading, make the higher bits whiter, and run it through the filter; that way it's all guaranteed to match up. I did something like that with the E9 months ago, posted a pic here somewhere.

I can't remember what direction pale background colour will give when you use it in the normal map, but it will appear to shade the body because it's messing up the angle of the reflections. That isn't the same as making controlled bumps, though. GIMP has the normal map filter built right into it already, you can experiment as much as you like with it.