New Door & Wood Grain Column Textures: Comments & Critique

Not about OpenMW? Just about Morrowind in general? Have some random babble? Kindly direct it here.
User avatar
Frik
Posts: 124
Joined: 20 Dec 2016, 05:22

Re: New Door & Wood Grain Column Textures: Comments & Critiq

Post by Frik »

Pherim wrote:Simply removing the alpha channel actually doesn't work (at least in Gimp). You have to remove the layer mask, or if you already applied it, create a new one and select "Transfer layer's alpha channel". Then you can either paint it white again or simply delete it to get the original RGB normal map.
Yes! That worked. :mrgreen:
Pherim wrote:Yes, that is exactly how it is supposed to work. If it doesn't for you, maybe you did something wrong. If you like, upload your texture with the height map so I can have a look at it.
I did a quick test to demo what I'm seeing.

Here is the door in the game with a normal map.
in Game Normal Map _n
in Game Normal Map _n
Here is the door in the game with the same normal map and additional height information in alpha.
In Game Normal Height Map _nh
In Game Normal Height Map _nh
Attaching the normal map with additional height data added to alpha.
tx_common_door_nh.dds.zip
Texture and Normal Height Map _nh
(1.83 MiB) Downloaded 150 times
Thanks for your assistance!
User avatar
Pherim
Posts: 140
Joined: 27 Aug 2014, 15:37

Re: New Door & Wood Grain Column Textures: Comments & Critiq

Post by Pherim »

Ok, I see the problem. This time you need to save the normal map as DXT5 because of the transparency! With DXT1, the alpha channel is only 1 bit, so every pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque, and additionally, all transparent pixels get set to white, so the normal map's RGB information is lost.
User avatar
Frik
Posts: 124
Joined: 20 Dec 2016, 05:22

Re: New Door & Wood Grain Column Textures: Comments & Critiq

Post by Frik »

Well, dang! I should have realized that. :?

It still looks pretty weird, but I'll chalk that up to being bad height data, as you all pointed out, is what commonly happens when trying to programatically generate a height map from a flat texture.
_nh Map Saved as DXT5
_nh Map Saved as DXT5
Post Reply