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Bump mapping the Kodiak

Okay a little update....


Added some little details like indented door handles and pod hatches. Wrinkled metal sort of fades away when moving up the fuse. The lower parts have been beaten worse. Removed rivets from cowling and made it a bit smoother than the rest of the fuse. Also removed the rivets from the pod.

kbumps1.jpg


kbumps2.jpg


The belly of the beast is in worst condition:engel016: I also enhanced panel lines in the wings and added rivets around wings' access hatches as seen in the photo posted by Bill.
kbumps3.jpg


kbumps4.jpg
 
Awesome work Pekka!


You will notice some bump area's are reveresed. That is because 'mirrored' parts have a bug where the bump mapping (in Gmax) will go in the opposite direction on a part that is cloned and mirrored. Parts include the RH wing, half of the Fuselage, RH side of the rudder, etc.. So if you see on the bump maps that the bumps are 'innies' and not 'outies', that is why.

Sort of makes it difficult on painting these with bumpies. You have to set there and redo the opposite mirrored parts over and over to balance out the bumps to be the same size height.

By the way. These are not actually raised surfaces. They do not have height, its all done by shadow and highlights by the computer shading system. If you watch how the edges blend, you'll see they go flush but still hold their shading and reflections.. Wild technology.
 
Thanks guys:wavey:.

Yep Bill, I noticed that. But I sort of reversed the reversing when doing these, to keep it more simple, so both side are same kind in my bumps. I noticed when I was testing these, that on some very rare occasions there were these "innies", depending on the viewing angle and light. I also tested if I want to reverse the another side quickly afterwards, I just need to rasterize the layer I want to reverse and invert it.
 
Hey Pekka,

Yep!

What I do is make the bumps seperate layers. My work flow is;
* Take the texture PSD file, rename it to 'textureblahblah_bump.PSD'
* Make a gray layer at the top of the stack
* Clone the rivets layer, raise to top of stack over the gray layer
* Clone the panels layer, raise also to the top.
* Clone Misc bumpings, raise also to the top
* Leave all layers 'seperate' and desaturate them. I usually remove (turn off the effect) of any shading on them so you dont have ins and outs on each thing. (The shaders will do that for you).
* Adjust lightness and darknesses of innies and outies
* Burn a BMP from it.
* Take BMP and run through the Photoshop nVidia Bump tool system, saving as a DDS, export to FSX and test.

I have had outies turn to innies sometimes when I would boot up FSX. I would change them back (reverse them) and in FSX, they were again backwards, so that makes me think the shading engine sometimes 'throws a wobbly' and reverses things. System comfusion? Curse of the 'X'? dont know.. But it happened several times...

Test several times, different times of day..



Bill
 
Are you using the Nvidia Normal Map Filter to make your bump files?

IMHO opinion it works very well and is very easy to use.

VCN-1
 
Yep I run them through Nvidia and save as BMP, them run the BMPs through imagetool with this command -nobeep -nomip -dxt5 -RedInAlpha -dds –nodither.
 
lookin good m8! I've been playing with Bump mapping for awhile now, but more on Default aircraft.

The tires seem Really shiny, might want to white out the alpha channel on the tires.
 
Thanks Tim! Tires are the same as in default paints, haven't done anything with them. And they do have white alphas:engel016:
 
I think I'm done with this LOL. Thank you all for help, I think I've learned a lot.:applause:

Some updates since last time:

Added more details, now every ding in the belly has corresponding intending, like they really were rock hits.
cancg2.jpg




Diffuse map now has matching colored pod hatches with bump map. Also added few dings and wear to pod. All hard painted rivets from diffuse maps have been removed.
cancg1.jpg
 
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