Terrain Normal/Spec Maps ?

[MrTwosheds]

That's the tricky bit, making them look like the originals, It would be quite easy to just collect a bunch of terrain textures and decide to addon/replace the originals, but the units and buildings need to look very similar and that takes hard work.
Probably no need to worry about the moaners actually, most of them wouldn't load an addon textures pack anyway as they prefer to play with a single texture layer at 640x480 resolution... (yes really)

Programmatically upscaled textures would look pretty close.

May well work for many textures. Units I suspect are the most problematic, clearly the originals where quite heavily optimised down to 256x256, lots of unpleasing things become apparent when you scale them back up. Ivtank00 for example, the tank is not UV mapped correctly on its underside, its just black, even A tiny bit of noise or pixelation caused ugly triangles to appear, so without some work on the model the underside has to remain pure black.


Trying this out...http://photocomix-resources.deviantart. ... -100248242
Wow, it works really well, good for getting rid of pixelation and smoothing stuff out.

[Nielk1]

I have managed to re-create the colors ISDF texture bits flawlessly from scratch, however, I have not been able to do the metal bits. I think those might be hand painted and I work in shape layers.

[Zax]

Changing that would generally require shaders, which is a giant can of worms. And I'm not wanting to go there for a long while yet -- there's just too many players w/o pixel shader support, and supporting/debugging a second graphics pipeline is a LOT of work.

Less a can of worms, more about opening the hatch and throwing a slab of meat to the gators.

[Ded10c]

For want of a better thread to put it in, TJ has reported that the SSBump Generator built for the Source engine works well for BZ2 units.

[jaydenbz2]

Dude, EMBM works totally different, It's not a live bump map, a true bump map would require a more code, also, they are ugly live, as they only posses height data which **** with the normals if not done in a render, tangent space normal require shaders and look way nicer, I'm sorry, but It just isn't doable on this engine in the foreseeable future.

[TheJamsh]

For want of a better thread to put it in, TJ has reported that the SSBump Generator built for the Source engine works well for BZ2 units.

Well, it will create a bumpmap that gives similar effects to those of stock BZ2. When Jayden made the textures for the Hi-Poly sabre tank, he also generated very good Normal maps for it. Out of curiosity I dropped those into the SS-Bump software and tried them in-game. Results below, with and without EMBM. I kind of like the shiny bio-metallic like glow they give off, but I only made them because I'm a completionist.

To the OP - Your talents would be better spent texturing higher-polygon models to what BZ2 currently has now. No point doing the ones we have. Wouldn't do them justice. BZ2's Models and Textures need to be redone if we want the game to look better. Nobodies going to put in the time though, because BZ2's units are somewhat extraordinarily hard to replicate WELL. Whoever originally worked on the art team actually had considerable modelling talent, they managed to make the models look a lot more highly detailed than what they actually are, to the point where it's difficult to add mesh detail to the base model.

The tank below proves my point. Diffuse maps add colour, that's it. Mesh is where you're going to get the detail in this game, and modern GPU's can handle it. Regardless, you're never going to get the LOD you seem to be looking for.

Anyway, without bump-maps:


And with.

[Red Spot]

You're probably not going to like me for this ....



I prefer the one without ...

Edit: to be a bit more specific, I find the bumpmap 'over the top', somewhere ½-way in between with and without would probably be more to my liking.

[TheJamsh]

To be honest, I don't like the effect of it much at all haha, and I'd rather it covered the whole tank rather than specific areas. Might try fiddling with the threshold level of the bump maps and see what results I get.

[jaydenbz2]

Battlezone 2's EMBM was never a good feature, especially bad for high res textures, as it's not really a true, live bump or TSN map, it is not affected by the light source at all, it is "baked" over the existing diffuse, unfortunately the best way to emulate shading is through pre-made emboss to your different layers, that, ir paint them in, either way is the better alternative.

[TheJamsh]

It could probably still be useful for some things though, if not anything to do with light. BUMP's don't seem to be affected by light sources, so you could maybe use them as a secondary glow map or some kind, or to mimic some sort of bio-metallic material.

[Commando]

That looks like the Heavy Sabre. I like that the top gun looks different. It's a nice touch.

[Zero Angel]

That's a decent respin of the sabre. Is the top barrel the mortar HP?

[MrTwosheds]

Bz2's bump maps might be useful, if some one makes a painter and decorator race... the scrubbed off emulsion look might suit them.
If your making high poly models, much better looking effects can be created by using multiple materials on different parts of the mesh. Making some parts shiny and other parts dull looks good and stops the shine spoiling texture details and allows you to decide which bits display team color and which bits don't.

[APCs r Evil]

The tank does look very nice but I keep being drawn back to the fact that despite how spiffy it looks, it has a glaringly obvious fault...

It's just not orange enough.

[Zax]

The tank does look very nice but I keep being drawn back to the fact that despite how spiffy it looks, it has a glaringly obvious fault...

It's just not orange enough.

The better to see the blood splatters in the gritty HD remake.