Not Normal Maps

FOO FIGHTER

FOO FIGHTER

Charter Member
Made two new bump maps on two different AC recently and now getting this weird shading effect. Other AC with older bump maps are unaffected. Spent the last three days trying to figure out what happened without success. Using Nvidia photoshop filter, adjusting Brightness/Shading and then saving as Normal Map dds with various settings (1 & 2 pixels, Wrap/3x3, etc.). Anyone else had this experience? Remedy?
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Hmm, can't say I've seen that issue before, so can't advise, I've just done a bump map for the Wellington, here's the setting I use. T1.jpg2.jpghey have always worked without any problems.
 
Aha! Your pic made me notice something!
After using the Nvidia photoshop filter, I adjusted the brightness/contrast a bit and then saved as a dds. If I don't make any adjustments to the brightness/contrast then it comes out normal. This is odd as I have always made some sort of those adjustments. Perhaps I made them too severe this time, will have to experiment more.
Do you make any adjustments to brightness/contrast or shadow/highlights before saving to dds?
 
Glad it helped. No I don't bother making any adjustments, I like my bump maps to be subtle, can overpower your texture if overdone, imo.
Your issue could also be linked to the spec textures, I notice my bump maps look slightly different with and without a speculative texture?
 
Some of you may be already aware of this or it could just be my imagination: I've been saving the BMP in 24 bit before conversion to dds but have recently tried saving in 32 bit. It seems (to me at least) that the map appears crisper or cleaner. 24 bit seems to have some minor fuzzing along edges.
 
I thought 32 but just meant it had an alpha? I have noticed a huge improvement by saving my dds files with the Nvidia converter tool. Compression artifacts are nearly impossible to detect. I had been using PaintDotNet, which doesn't do as well. Now I still create and edit textures in PaintDotNet, but save them as PNG and then use the Nvidia converter to convert them to dds.
 
I've been using an older version of Photoshop with the Nvidia plug-in almost exclusively now for years. I can't remember who turned me on to the plug-in, but here's to 'em.
 
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