Great Progress: Hires bumping with DDS (8:1) NORMAL maps

[t00fri]

Hi Fridger,

Why is your grayscale bumpmap invers ? My grayscale bumpmaps have white valey and black hills.

Well, since I use the alpha channel to convert the bump map into a normal map. Otherwise, I would not get brightness in illuminated areas. Example for testing: The southern end of South America: there are some nice snowy high Andes mountains. When the sun raises in the east the lit site must be white, the other one dark gray...

Now a question: work your normal-map correct i mean have shadows and light the real orientiation ? I have some truble with Celestia. Bumpmaping works only fine if i switch vertexshader off.

In my case everything works perfectly, but I had to invert the bumpmap in the alpha channel!

But nightlight is not fine. Vertexshader works only if i switch bumpmaping on. If bumpmaping and vertexshader is on all because bumpmaping work fine even haze. I thought haze can't used on a geforce2.

With sufficiently new NV-drivers haze works perfectly with a GF2 (I have one). I use the latest drivers.

Now some good news. I played a little bit with the generated normal-maps and split the RGB-channels. The complete information is stored in red- and green-channel where red has the horizontal- and green the vertical-values. If you lock close you will see that the picture of one channel is that what photoshop made with the relief-filter from a grayscale bumpmap. The trick is that the red-channel needs an angel of 0° and the green-channel 90°. Further there must be a temporary border added to the picture which have to be cut after filtering or you will get a line on the mapborder. This happens also if someone use a sharpness-filter on a planet-map (look at the yellow line on jupiter).

Why i tell you about this way ? The quality of such a normal-map is much better than this one made with Nvidias-commandline-tools :-)

I also get a big improvement using a 3x3 sampling instead of 5x5. The higher, the less structure...

My normal map is virtually perfect, meanwhile.

Another thing, the blue-channel must be fill with white-color (grayscale) because black mask the planet-map. I believ this can be used for specular-infomation this makes sence but i don't know. Please check the Celestia code.

But we have a special file for specular info...

Bye Fridger

[jim]

I also get a big improvement using a 3x3 sampling instead of 5x5. The higher, the less structure...

My normal map is virtually perfect, meanwhile.

I have tested -n4 -n3x3 -n5x5 shitches with nvdxt and compared these maps with the relief-filter-map and believe me this one looks better. Also it's easier to find the best bumphigh because you see what you do.

Another thing, the blue-channel must be fill with white-color (grayscale) because black mask the planet-map. I believ this can be used for specular-infomation this makes sence but i don't know. Please check the Celestia code.

But we have a special file for specular info...

I know but if this work... 16ktextur + 16k bump + 16k spec will be possible (for some systems).

Bye Jens

[praesepe]

Hi-Res bumpmapping at last! Following t00fri's method, i've been playing with some textures and i'm happy with the results Here i post some screenshots:

Donald Edward's New Earth 8k DDS texture:


Space-grapics Mars resized to 8k and converted to DDS:


8k Moon DDS from Clementine:


8k Venus surface DDS:


PD: I used a 8k normal map in all shots, with 3x3 sampling.

[jim]

Hi all,

Now a have pictures. The best at first some sreenshots showing how my 8k-normal-map work. I have vertex shader disabeld (you know my problem).
textures: 16k earth, my 8k normal-map, Fridgers 2k clouds



The Anden at morning and evening (compare it with fridgers screenshot)


Himalaya without and with bumpmaping (no clouds):

Ok i'm not realy happy with my 16k earth but i have only this one. I would love it if celestia-sun get more power (earth, ISS,... all looks too dark. Chris can you do that? (note: astronauts needs sunglasses)

Next one shows by a sample how i built my normal-map in Photo Paint (Corel).


Now a comparison between fridgers and my normal-map (built with Photo Paint and relief-filter).


Fridger did you unterstand why i ask if your normal-map works corect? My normal-map has more details but also another orientation. It works on my sytem fine.

In the end a demonstration of my problem with bumpmaping and vertex-shader.


vertex-shader disabled, bumpmaping works fine


vertex-shader anabled, you see the shit

The problem can not solved by rotation of the relief-filter!
Possible that this is only a promlem of my system (driver, hardware, Win98se). Let me know if i need a new sw-instalation.

Bye Jens

[Don. Edwards]

Fridger and everyone,
While I was playing around trying out the various ways of making .dds based bumpmaps I found a what I feel is a sever fault with the bumpmap from Space-Grphics.com. I found and area at the edge of the Himilyas that apears to have been pasted in from a much lower resolution bumpmap. So I did a little messing around in photoshop and used the healing tool to sample the area from the color image and then superimpose and heal the area. I think it turned out better than what was done the first time someone tried to fix this bumpmap. Have a look. The top it the before and the botoom is the after.

I think everyone should agree its better than before. If anyone wants the repaired version of the bumpmap at the original 10k resolution they can download it here http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/NewEarth-10K-Bump.zip
I hope to see this one used to make even better bumpmaps. I am still checking the bumpmap for more of these little paste overs but I have to do it at quite an enlargement and you can onluy cover so much terain at one time. If anyone sees other areas needing fixing let me know with a quick snapshot of the area and I can see what I can do.