United3dArtists

If your 3d authoring software can work with displacement maps, you can do some nifty textures mixed with a displacement map. Here's a quick little example I did in TS just for fun!

If you add a bump map or normal map, I am sure you can greatly enhance your textures.

that looks great D!

would you share how you did it? some wire frames and shader settings and things? I would love to try that kind of look&feel with bump maps!

Can you also share the texture maps you used?

very nice textures Draise

Draise wrote:If your 3d authoring software can work with displacement maps, you can do some nifty textures mixed with a displacement map. Here's a quick little example I did in TS just for fun!

If you add a bump map or normal map, I am sure you can greatly enhance your textures.

I have been obsessing over this issue for over 3 days, I have scoured the internet, looked at the manual, have tried everything to achieve something similar to this.

I looked at Andrew Price's blender tutorial on The Secrets of Realistic Texturing in Blender ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07H7xeUnGE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ) in the tut he uses a programme called Crazybump to make the maps for texturing, basically you bring in an image and the programme makes
AO
Displacement
Normal
and Specular maps, he then brings them into Blender on to the model and creates an almost photographic render of this cobblestone road, I found Shadermap which does the same thing at only a third of the price, but I have no idea how to use the maps in trueSpace to create a good looking textured surface on my spaceship model or
even if trueSpace can do this.

If it can be done can someone guide me please?

I hope this all made sense

Thanks in advance

Hello there! This is very much possible in the WS of trueSpace. It is a node based shader system, so you can play around with different aspects. But Prodigy made this great all-in-one shader.

This shader has the ability to have two normal maps, your normal diffuse map, and a specular map, also and environment map if necessary.

Using a dsiplacement map you can create more bump like features. I also know of a Parallax shader, but not sure how that one works, it's pretty though.



In truespace WS you have a main node (nesting withint your D3D shader) with a number of other nodes. Using the set nodes it gives your (like Normal Node, Alpha, Colour, etc) you can create a number of different inputs to mix and match.



This shader I am attaching - kindly provided by Prodigy/Augusto - has it all.

foff44 wrote: I have no idea how to use the maps in trueSpace to create a good looking textured surface on my spaceship model or
even if trueSpace can do this.

If it can be done can someone guide me please?

I hope this all made sense :)

Thanks in advance

Here is a tutorial on displacement mapping in Workspace.
It just covers the basic workflow, nothing fancy.
Damn the polies, full speed ahead!

The best displacement, bump or normal maps are the ones you create specifically for a texture. There is a whole art/science to this. The quick and easy way is to just use the same texture you use for the colour channels. Displacement and bump maps usually read the relative brightness of a pixel and use this to give the appearance of raising or lowering the corresponding pixel of your colour map.
Importing the colour map into the bump channel does not always give the most accurate results but by using the same image in your colour and bump channels you will at least get bump rendering that corresponds to the colours. The eye often compensates for this.

Normal maps work in a roughly similar way but instead of reading relative brightness of an image they read 3 different colours to modify the apparent height of each pixel. Normal maps intrinsically carry more information and so can give much better results than bump maps. The drawback is you need to use a specially prepared image for the normal map rather than just using the colour texture. I use the Gimp for almost all of my 2d texture work and there is a plug-in available for the gimp that will take a copy of your colour texture image and use various algorithms to create a normal map image. Experimentation and experience will tell you which algorithm will give you the best results dependant upon the requirements of the scene you are working on.

I find that getting the texture maps right is actually great fun and can save an awful lot of polygons in the right circumstances.

Hope this helps....

Thanks for the replies guys, getting down to some studying now