Half-life 2 character mapping + bump mapping.

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Kazuki_Fuse

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I just went over to www.gamersgallery.com where they've got some new pics of half-life 2. And the antlion in particular got me thinking, there was one screenshot in particular that I'm talking about, the finished one with all the lighting and mapping applied to it.

It looks fantastic, the mapping adds another dimension to the character model, but where's the character mapping in the E3 trailer? Or any of the other trailers apart from the bink source trailer for that matter? Compared to the screenshots and videos of the antlions I've seen from in game, this one with the mapping looks twice as good.

Does anyone think that character mapping seen in both the bink movie of the source engine and the gemersgallery pic will be used in the final release of the game? I'd be really dissapointed if it wasn't. I have doubts it won't too, since the 2004 E3 demo didn't show it off.
 
Maybe its because with HL2 its biggest selling point is the game, not the graphics like most games. Maybe thast why Valve aren't particularly worried about it. Don't worry though, im sure they'll include it in the final game.
 
I don't think it was on/completed in the 2003 binks, but in the 2004 movie it looks like a lot of things do have normal maps
 
Not even the ant lion ones are new. They're from a .pdf presentation that Valve made regarding all of the different shader and rendering passes possible in the Source engine.

I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere.
 
Still impressive but. Also if you watch the DirectX 9 bink video from last year it shows a specular/normal map that looks amazing on an Ant Lion guard.
 
Chris_D said:
Not even the ant lion ones are new. They're from a .pdf presentation that Valve made regarding all of the different shader and rendering passes possible in the Source engine.

I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere.
Click to expand...

Not sure if the antlion screenshots are older and were just reused for the presentation (doesn't appear to be as its a whole series...), but it is definitely where I first saw them.

The presentation is here: http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial10_Half-Life2_Shading.pdf

Go to Page 76 for the Final Result on the Ant Lion. The other stages/layers precede it.

Since most of the video we have seen has been on a cam (albeit a nice cam), it is possible we just can't see any of the nice effects because of the quality. It is also possible they were turned off for speed or are just hard to notice amid all the action... The HDR Bink proves the capabilites are there and possible in game.
 
Totalkrusher said:
Since most of the video we have seen has been on a cam (albeit a nice cam), it is possible we just can't see any of the nice effects because of the quality. It is also possible they were turned off for speed or are just hard to notice amid all the action... The HDR Bink proves the capabilites are there and possible in game.
Click to expand...

Yeah I guess those are strong possibilites. But the Bink video's purpose was to show off the capabilities of the engine, I know it's capable of rendering like that, but weather the Antlion in the Bink video is the same in game model that they're using for Half-life 2 remains to been seen, because apart from that video I haven't seen a model in any Half-Life 2 video or pic look like that Antlion did, in terms of mapping effects. The only character mapping I noticed in the E3 04 demo was mapping on the Combine soldier's eyes.

I dunno, maybe I've got no reason to be worried. The game will be awesome either way. :cheers:
 
Kazuki_Fuse said:
Yeah I guess those are strong possibilites. But the Bink video's purpose was to show off the capabilities of the engine, I know it's capable of rendering like that, but weather the Antlion in the Bink video is the same in game model that they're using for Half-life 2 remains to been seen, because apart from that video I haven't seen a model in any Half-Life 2 video or pic look like that Antlion did, in terms of mapping effects. The only character mapping I noticed in the E3 04 demo was mapping on the Combine soldier's eyes.

I dunno, maybe I've got no reason to be worried. The game will be awesome either way. :cheers:
Click to expand...

I cannot agrue with that one bit. I was merely guessing as to the reason. We know its possible it can do it, but it's very possible that many computers will not be able to have that running on everything in large heated sequences. Honestly, the graphics are not nearly as important as the gameplay/fun-factor is.
 
Not sure what you mean by 'character mapping'. Do you mean normal mapping on characters? Do you mean specular mapping?

Not sure what you're talking about in general either. In all the videos we've seen, all character faces are very obviously normal-mapped. None of the faces have a jagged look that would come from using a bunch of non-normal mapped polys; they're shaded per-pixel. Look at any of the character faces in any of the videos, Alyx's face in the e32k3 kliener's lab bink is the highest res.

Not sure what you see different between the HDR ant-lion bink and the e3 binks. Except the HDR of course.
 
dscowboy said:
Not sure what you mean by 'character mapping'. Do you mean normal mapping on characters? Do you mean specular mapping?

Not sure what you're talking about in general either. In all the videos we've seen, all character faces are very obviously normal-mapped. None of the faces have a jagged look that would come from using a bunch of non-normal mapped polys; they're shaded per-pixel. Look at any of the character faces in any of the videos, Alyx's face in the e32k3 kliener's lab bink is the highest res.

Not sure what you see different between the HDR ant-lion bink and the e3 binks. Except the HDR of course.
Click to expand...

This is getting a bit out of my league, 'cause I don't know all that much about mapping. I guess what I noticed was that the antlions in the bugbait video or any e3 videos dont look like they do in the gamersgallery pic or the HDR video, in terms of shinyness.
 
dscowboy said:
Not sure what you mean by 'character mapping'. Do you mean normal mapping on characters? Do you mean specular mapping?

Not sure what you're talking about in general either. In all the videos we've seen, all character faces are very obviously normal-mapped. None of the faces have a jagged look that would come from using a bunch of non-normal mapped polys; they're shaded per-pixel. Look at any of the character faces in any of the videos, Alyx's face in the e32k3 kliener's lab bink is the highest res.

Not sure what you see different between the HDR ant-lion bink and the e3 binks. Except the HDR of course.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I didn't even notice "character mapping."

What I meant by mentioning the HDR (assuming your talking to me), is that the overall graphical quality was far higher than in the e3 2004 videos; I was careful to qualify that comparison by saying the quality in the shaky-cam videos probably remove alot of the effects from apprent view.

Also, I wasn't speaking about the non-action-oriented sequences when people's faces are close to you and easily noticeable...I was referring more to where there were alot of moving characters/enemies on the screen at once (although, it probably doesn't matter that much to the engine, especially when the enemies are less complex then the main-characters (Alyx, Eli, etcetera)).

EDIT:
Kazuki_Fuse said:
I guess what I noticed was that the antlions in the bugbait video or any e3 videos dont look like they do in the gamersgallery pic or the HDR video, in terms of shinyness.
Click to expand...

Hehe... "shinyness" is kind of the non-technical way of saying that... lol...

The AntLion Commander (actual name escapes me), seemed a little too shiny though, although it may have been raining, in which the effect was very well done.
 
ok, I see
you're right, the antlions do not look normal-mapped in the gameplay vids, and there's definitely a different specular map on the one in the HDR vid. Valve has said they may not include HDR with the initial HL2 release, maybe normal-mapped antlions is another bit they've created but elected not to put into the game yet for some mysterious reason. It's possible that there are no cards out yet with enough VRAM to handle all the bitmaps required to render every character in that quality... but that's unlikely. It would certainly increase loading time...

Yeah, not sure why Valve is apparently keeping some of the content and technology they've created out of the game. Maybe they want to show off Steam patching after the game is released?
 
Sparta said:
Maybe its because with HL2 its biggest selling point is the game, not the graphics like most games. Maybe thast why Valve aren't particularly worried about it. Don't worry though, im sure they'll include it in the final game.
Click to expand...

agreed.. and if u ask pple browsing here, most would tell u that gameplay is more important than graphics.. so not too many pple will be whining about it either way.
 
Valve said that HDR was switched off in this years E3 demos, prolly that's why the antlions weren't shiny?

I'm sure valve won't reveal the full capabillities and show us it's effect before release...I mean they have to surprise us with something...
 
I'm pretty sure HDR has nothing to do with the shinyness. HDR is simply an expansion of the number of colours and shades possible inside the program.
 
The dx9 demo said "high dynamic range lighting", and we got to see the shiny windows/solar panel-like things and the shiny skin of the antlions. Now why whould they show us that in a HDR test demo if it has nothing to do with it?
 
lans said:
The dx9 demo said "high dynamic range lighting", and we got to see the shiny windows/solar panel-like things and the shiny skin of the antlions. Now why whould they show us that in a HDR test demo if it has nothing to do with it?
Click to expand...

*sigh*

It has nothing to do with shinyness, trust me. It can make reflections look better and more realistic, but it has nothing to do with the antlion. It was a DX9 showoff vid, and character bumpmapping IS DX9 only.

I'm pretty sure there will be highres models in the game like the antlion guard. When those students went to Valve, the took a picture of a screen with a headcrab in ZBrush. The students also said Valve was primarily busy with making high res models for normal mapping.
 
Well, it doesn't. HDR is about color balance and brightness levels. The rest was specular mapping. HDR can indeed combine with specular mapping to give things are really glowy reflection, but other than the spheres I'm not sure the demo showed that.
 
Hmm, I really need to dig into that zbrush2.0 program. Its ideal for making displacement and normal maps, its alot more like sculpting, unfortionatly its a bit confusing and all.
 
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