Parallax/Relief Mapping?

L

Lonely Soldier

Guest
Hi everyone,

I'm new, so I hope this is the right place to ask this.

I was wondering if this program:http://doom3.filefront.com/file/DOOM_3_Relief_Mapping;50039 (used here on Doom 3), could be modified to work on Half-Life 2. The program itself is called normal2depth.exe and converts .tgas to depth maps, which then, through some mysterious process, appear as relief maps in the game.

So, is this possible in Source? Or does the engine not support such a thing? Is it an OpenGL only thing?

Thanks,
Lonely Soldier
 
Canuck, over at the Dreamscape mod has implemented Relief Mapping into source. Check out the forums for more pics.
 
Ah yes, so he has! Well, would there be a possiblity of a conversion tool being used on the rest of the main games textures then? Or perhaps such a tool already exists and could be released?
 
well a depth map is the same as a height map right? just a black and white map for calculating depth..

the hard part would be coding in the relief maps to the source egine,, canucks implementation seems good enough though
 
Indeed, so perhaps we should ask him how he did it? Relief maps seem to be more attractive anyway. I hope that the technique isn't a secret :)
 
lol Cool. Thanks for that Canuck! I'd already had a (brief and bemused) look at that. So applying it to any engine is the same? Any engine can just have the shaders applied?
 
It's mostly done in the code already. The HL2 Coders Mailing List has had a walkthrough of how to do it many times.

-Angry Lawyer
 
so why dont you just use the doom3 version? all it does is turn a colored map into a greyscale, it's not engine exclusive (.... is it? :D)
 
Angry Lawyer said:
It's mostly done in the code already. The HL2 Coders Mailing List has had a walkthrough of how to do it many times.

-Angry Lawyer
Click to expand...


How can we subscribe to that mailing list? I remember before HL2 went gold there was a link to a Website so we could subscribe but I can't find it anymore.
 
Angry Lawyer - Do you have a link to any of those?

Shinobi - Well, I think the program is specifically for Doom 3 and Quake IV, which of course both use the D3 engine. I tried putting a simple tga through the program and it did change it:
Here's the original, saved as a jpeg for size reasons:


And here is the file after I put it through the normal2depth.exe:


The original .tga was of course, not a normal map, so the results aren't at all conclusive. Could someone refer me to where I can find the HL2 textures on my PC? Are the HL2 textures normal maps? If not, is there a converter?
 
ok, well that's not a normal map, that's a color map


a nomal map map looks all pink and purple like 3d glasses
 
Could you refer me to a normal map? Are there any in HL2 anyway?
 
I've just found a program (here) that will convert tgas to displacement maps, which are required for parallax mapping. I tried it out on a stone wall texture for the game Rome: Total War:

Here is the original texture, converted to a jpeg for size reasons:

And here is the displacement map:


Now, essentially, the wall, when viewed from various angles, would have bricks that jutted out, that is assuming that the right shaders were working, which I doubt they would be.

This is probably meaningless to a lot of people :D I know it is to me! I believe displacement mapping is another name for parallax mapping though. I still have no idea on relief mapping. But I have tried to use the Doom3 engine normal2depth.exe converter but to no avail.

Is there anyone here who knows a lot about textures and shaders?

Here are some sites on normal maps and such. We are going to need normal maps to create depth maps to use for Relief maps :p . That is unless we use parallax mapping, though relief looks better in my opinion.
http://members.shaw.ca/jimht03/normal.html - this appears to be for a specific program though.

http://www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps1.html
 
The normal2depth.exe converter stores the depth map ( inverse of height map ) in the alpha channel.
 
Wha'...? I'm clueless about most of this stuff. I'm only playing around here :D
 
ok, the thing about those color maps to depth map programs is they dont usually turn out that good, if you already have the normal map then converting it is good.... but it's become very aparent yo me, the only way to have REALLY good
normal maps is to actually model the geometry....
 
I thought that might be the case. So HL2 doesn't use normal maps? I'd just like to try to convert some to relief maps, but if it doesn't have 'em then that's too bad.
 
yes!! halflife 2 has TONS of normal maps! all the stuff that gives off bumps have normal maps !!


you were just using the wrong map, you need the normal map, not the color map
 
Ok, but how do I get to them? Do I need some special unpacker?

And, yeah, I know about bump maps, but I didn't realise that normal maps were the same thing.
 
heh :) bump maps are actually the same thing as height maps just to confuse you


ok second thing is you need a program called GCFScape to extract anything from HL2


ok let's clarify this right now

Greyscale height map terms : Height/Depth/Relief/Bump/Parallax map

Rainbow Colored/Bule-Pink Colored map: Normal map (world space and tangent respectively)
 
thanks for that link AL. i noticed parralax map with a check box in the model viewer. when i searched parallax i found nothing but i never searched parallaxmap.
 
Very interesting indeed! So to implement that in to the singleplayer of HL2 would require new textures as well? There isn't a program which would just convert all the normal maps and such like the normal2depth.exe for Doom 3, is there?
 
With NF, we've found that the standard Parallax implemented by enabling Valve's existing code is rather poor. You need to put more work in to make it self-occluding, and self-shadowing.
 
Ah, so you can get some sort of effect just by enabling the code technique, without doing any actual texturing stuff then? Would putting the games textures through the normal2depth.exe converter help or would it just mean that you had to code for relief mapping?

The mod looks great by the way :D
 
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