Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Forum topic for the mod Splat Terrain Texturing. This is a mod that aims at recreating the terrain of Daggerfall with a custom shader based on height-blending and splatmaps.

Amazing! Can't wait to try these out or see videos with them in action.

Hm, that looks pretty nice. This is not with DREAM right? It looks to actually fit better than the extremely low-res original ground.

I like this better than DREAM's ground textures. It really does fit better, IMO.

Absolutely outstanding! Great job!

I like it, please go on. Im also interrested if you can make the normal maps work properly, I certainly wasnt unfortunately.

EDIT removed old downloads

King of Worms wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:13 pm I like it, please go on. Im also interrested if you can make the normal maps work properly, I certainly wasnt unfortunately.

I didn't meet particular issues at the moment. Note that i'm not running a tool for automatic generation on every texture. Instead, i took a few main materials (grass, ground, etc.) and combined them in all 56 patterns, for both color and normal maps. This ought to ensure they have all the same strength.

I must admit, normal maps never seemed like the kind of thing that a person could draw and remain sane... Bump/Height maps, certainly -- pretty straightforward. But a normal map, with the surface normal's unit vector's x,y,z encoded in r,g,b?

(Technically, I believe you're encoding the "relative" surface normal, or the delta of the desired surface normal from the underlying 3D model's surface normal. Which makes sense and is what you'd expect, I just wanted to be clear that it's more dx,dy,dz rather than any kind of global x,y,z coords. And, I suppose, it should be du,dv,d?, since you only know texture coords, not model coords.)

(Then you get the extra weirdness of needing to keep it a _unit_ vector. While you're getting your tilt angles right, make sure the length is 1.0, or the lighting calculations will do weird things. Oddly enough, there must be some reason to want to allow "weird things", because if you were only going to allow unit vectors, you would only need to specify du,dv at each pixel, and d? could be calculated as "whatever makes the vector have length 1.0". That could be done by the hardware, though the resulting calculation involves some square roots, which are expensive at the pixel level, so maybe they just said "sort it out yourself offline and just tell us sane numbers")

Every one I've ever seen gives me a mild headache. Straightforward enough if you're starting with a high detail 3D model and baking those fine details down into a normal map to apply to a low-poly game model. Computers have no problem with it. And I could see doing a brick texture, I guess. Left edges of bricks would have low red intensity, right edges would have high red intensity, top edges would have low green intensity, bottom would have high green intensity. But for anything organic, or even just rounded? Brain hurts.

Now, I could definitely see how to have a program go from a bump/heightmap to making a normal map, but if that's all you're doing, why supply normal maps? Why not just supply the bump/heightmap? And then I realized that it's probably for the same reason as providing the third d? component -- it saves the pixel shader from having to calculate the local surface normal and just give it to it directly.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I'm impressed by anybody who is making normal maps by hand... And that I appreciate your devotion. If a bump->normal program would be useful, I'd be happy to contribute such a thing.

(I'm also aware that I haven't kept up with tools, and haven't played with Unity yet, so I apologize if this entire post is ridiculous and/or misguided...)

Wait, i'm not manually drawing normal maps! Daggerfall terrain is composed of a few tiles with a single material and many others for transition (i.e. half grass half stones). What i'm doing is making masks that covers the appropriate portion of the resulting texture, trying to make sure that they have the same general pattern as the classic textures and tiles correctly.

What I see in the image is a standard normal map. I dont understand what you describe here, eventho I would ŕeally love to.
Care to elaborate more on what is different with your approach than taking each tile and creating a normal map from it?
Id like to have this additional layer of detail on my terrain textures Thank you!