The Great Ensmallening

[nslay]

I don't understand the "normal map" example. It looks like plastic molding... is this supposed to be a collection of textures for a normal map stuffed into an image? Otherwise, it looks like a plastic Grineer version of Europa confined to a small square.

[Aadi880]

1 hour ago, nslay said:

I don't understand the "normal map" example. It looks like plastic molding... is this supposed to be a collection of textures for a normal map stuffed into an image? Otherwise, it looks like a plastic Grineer version of Europa confined to a small square.

From the looks of it, the normal map provides the "depth" onto objects. For example, the bumps and crevices you often see on warframe skins. If I am not mistaken, they dictate how a surface should be shaded by nearby light. This can give any flat, 2D colored texture the illusion of it being 3D when it is placed on a normal map.

It is much better and much easier to use a normal map over just actually modelling the bumps and crevices because they take lower processing power to load in and out and are easier to make by the artist, while still maintaining relatively the same look. A disadvantage of using normal maps could the the appearences of false colors from multiple light sources overriding each other. 

If you are wondering, THAT particular normal map is the texture of the Grinner Galleon you see in railjack missions and outside the orbiter.

 

[nslay]

2 hours ago, Aadi880 said:

From the looks of it, the normal map provides the "depth" onto objects. For example, the bumps and crevices you often see on warframe skins. If I am not mistaken, they dictate how a surface should be shaded by nearby light. This can give any flat, 2D colored texture the illusion of it being 3D when it is placed on a normal map.

It is much better and much easier to use a normal map over just actually modelling the bumps and crevices because they take lower processing power to load in and out and are easier to make by the artist, while still maintaining relatively the same look. A disadvantage of using normal maps could the the appearences of false colors from multiple light sources overriding each other. 

If you are wondering, THAT particular normal map is the texture of the Grinner Galleon you see in railjack missions and outside the orbiter.

 

I could see it being a depth map for the textures themselves. It sure doesn't look like a depth map of a normal map either. It looks like a collection of Grineer objects. By "normal map", I understood that to mean either the textures of Grineer Galleon or one of the tiles that can appear in a Grineer Galleon map (the actual game map we play on).  Maybe that's my source of confusion...

[Aadi880]

6 minutes ago, nslay said:

I could see it being a depth map for the textures themselves. It sure doesn't look like a depth map of a normal map either. It looks like a collection of Grineer objects. By "normal map", I understood that to mean either the textures of Grineer Galleon or one of the tiles that can appear in a Grineer Galleon map (the actual game map we play on).  Maybe that's my source of confusion...

Its probably because of how the evolution engine does textures on models, I think.

I have messed about in Tennogen some time ago. When I opened the Titania Default Helmet, it indeed did looked like a "collection" of  parts (Her 2 ears were separate from the main head), while also looking like plastic molding.

The colors were saved/mapped onto a DIFFERENT file. My guess is that the engine lays them over and then puts them onto the model. How it does it, though, I'm not really sure.

It does look like to be the Galleon itself, as I can see the two, I think.... wings (??? idk, grinner design looks like insects to me???). But I do recognise the underside of the galleon on the bottom right had corner.

 

Maybe I should spend more time looking at walls. :-/ 

[32768]

On 2020-09-19 at 5:37 PM, nslay said:

I could see it being a depth map for the textures themselves. It sure doesn't look like a depth map of a normal map either. It looks like a collection of Grineer objects. By "normal map", I understood that to mean either the textures of Grineer Galleon or one of the tiles that can appear in a Grineer Galleon map (the actual game map we play on).  Maybe that's my source of confusion...

You are probably used to see normal maps in tangent space where they appear mostly blue-ish with red and green. But this shade comes from tangent space itself where each normal is encoded with a unit vector which looks like blue, red or green pixel or combinaton of those.

It's hard to tell what they call normal map here, i assume it's a bump map or height map that is being transformed to tangent-space normal map somewhere in the engine. Or maybe this is how normals look in non-tangent space, or maybe it's tangent space in grayscale. Although i don't know why would you encode normals in grayscale, they still need to encode all 3 components of normal, so it shouldn't really matter since every normal would require 3 channels anyway. So apparently it's something like bump map, i guess.

Maybe it takes less space to store bump maps in grayscale and reconstruct normal maps from that, idk.

[32768]

For anyone interested in actual difference between images:

It is indeed hard to tell what the difference is, but imagemagick can reveal the truth

compare NormalBase\(19MB\).jpg.4a35315e07a978e3597fabecd44b1333.jpg NormalRDO\(8MB\).jpg.78662471a18e02d81bea803577f2dd96.jpg diff.png

 

[Kontrollo]

On 2020-09-19 at 4:37 PM, nslay said:

I could see it being a depth map for the textures themselves. It sure doesn't look like a depth map of a normal map either. It looks like a collection of Grineer objects. By "normal map", I understood that to mean either the textures of Grineer Galleon or one of the tiles that can appear in a Grineer Galleon map (the actual game map we play on).  Maybe that's my source of confusion...

I've brought that up here, too:

Spoiler

 

My guess is that it's a bump map, not a normal map. Or I could imagine they have a tool that unwraps the geometry into the "flat space" of a texture, kinda the reverse of how textures are applied ingame. Normal maps look something like this:

 

Whereas a bump/displacement map is just height information (center) and therefore greyscale:

 

 

However on another note, I've played around with the models and files they provide for Tennogen, and while some of them use different PBR techniques (and therefore encode different information), they have the same file name convention. So maybe the devs use bump maps on some things and normal maps on others, and it was just a misnomer in the OP.

[nslay]

24 minutes ago, Kontrollo said:

I've brought that up here, too:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

My guess is that it's a bump map, not a normal map. Or I could imagine they have a tool that unwraps the geometry into the "flat space" of a texture, kinda the reverse of how textures are applied ingame. Normal maps look something like this:

 

Whereas a bump/displacement map is just height information (center) and therefore greyscale:

 

 

However on another note, I've played around with the models and files they provide for Tennogen, and while some of them use different PBR techniques (and therefore encode different information), they have the same file name convention. So maybe the devs use bump maps on some things and normal maps on others, and it was just a misnomer in the OP.

You and another poster assume that I know or understand more than I actually do. I know what normal vectors are and I know that they might be stored with meshes... but this is a video game forum. I seldom expect DE to be so technical... assuming "normal map" has anything to do with normal vectors?

Really... I know very little about computer graphics. I've played a little with Second Life and made my own flying light bulb vehicle (scripted and all... I could climb on top of it and fly away with keyboard controls). I think I tried to learn more about the textures and making nice detailed shapes. But I was too busy with school and later, my job, to continue my hobbyist exploration of custom asset design in Second Life and 3D art.

You may think it silly, but I interpreted "normal map" to mean like... you know... your every day Grineer map or Grineer map tile? I did not expect mathematical concepts here. And while I admit that textures are probably specialized concepts, I think most Warframe players (and probably gamers in general) are more familiar with texturing than with vector/mesh geometry concepts.

That said, there are a handful of mathematically inclined posters here (including me). Warframe is pretty unique in that even forum posters are using scripting languages like Python. The height of Wizard forum Diablo 3 theory crafting was spread sheets last I visited Blizzard forums. I'm seeing more sophisticated analysis here in the Warframe community (not that there is anything wrong with spread sheets). Honestly, I think that's cool. I have a brother-in-law who learned a lot of sophisticated vocabulary from video games and I think it's cool that now games and game communities teach players more advanced mathematics topics/ideas. This obviously inspires people to study more STEM topics... and with pride.

[32768]

56 minutes ago, nslay said:

You may think it silly, but I interpreted "normal map" to mean like... you know... your every day Grineer map or Grineer map tile? I did not expect mathematical concepts here. And while I admit that textures are probably specialized concepts, I think most Warframe players (and probably gamers in general) are more familiar with texturing than with vector/mesh geometry concepts.

Normal map is texture with directions encoded on it. Normal because it encode normals, map because it's flat (texture).

Usual texture applied to mesh is like wallpaper, it's completely flat and contains only color informmation, then you need to add shading to it to simulate depth. Remember that your monitor surface is also flat, so to make your brain perceive it as a 3D space, texture applied to mesh has to be shaded. It's really that simple, just light and shadows (and perspective perhaps).

To set depth to a flat wallpaper you combine it with another texture that doesn't have colors info, but has some sort of surface (normal) directions in it instead. Color + direction = color shaded.

This is why it looks like a plastic molding, because it encodes direction and looks that way when it does that.

P.S. This bump maps/normal maps/height maps stuff, i think, depends on who are you talking to. Different people might call same thing differently or different things with the same word. Even though there might be some language experts who can explain differences very accurately, alas it's not me.

[Kontrollo]

1 hour ago, nslay said:

You and another poster assume that I know or understand more than I actually do. I know what normal vectors are and I know that they might be stored with meshes... but this is a video game forum. I seldom expect DE to be so technical... assuming "normal map" has anything to do with normal vectors? ...

Oh alright then. Normal maps and bump maps are used to give the illusion of additional depth on polygons by manipulating the light calculations. The bump map example in my previous post shows that well.

Normal maps are different in that they adjust where a point on a polygon is "supposed to be facing", the surface normal vector's direction. Each colour channel represents a different axis, and that gives these textures their unique look when viewed as pictures. (Also not all engines do it the same way, so normal maps might have to have a channel flipped to work correctly.)

I've taken the above normal map example from Wikipedia, the article has some more which should make it all clear.

[(PSN)nguyenbee]

Nice

 

[quxier]

11 hours ago, (PS4)nguyenbee said:

Nice

You know, you can just... like a post instead of posting such posts?

[Chronolegion116]

Any Updates/Info , when the rest of the Texture updates will get released?

Because of data cap - My downloads stop - but cant resume - for some reason, it tries to redownload the entire update.  As such might as well reinstall after all the major replacements are done.

[[DE]Rebecca]

See here for Part 2: