Game Development Community

Auto normal mapping in Torque?

by Chris · in Torque 3D Professional · 06/11/2010 (9:53 pm) · 2 replies

Has anyone played with auto normals in Torque like Unity supports?

I've seen some fantastic results from people importing plain assets into unity, then in Torque they look pretty terrible when set side by side and most of this is because of unitys normal support.

Just how hard is it to build these in code?

#1
06/13/2010 (5:47 am)
It's quire rude to ask for something without even explaining what it is or showing what it looks like. You mean something like having Crazy Bump integrated?
#2
06/13/2010 (6:53 am)
@Chris: I think if what you're talking about is having the engine automatically generate normal maps from the diffuse maps, it would probably be better in the long run to stick with doing that outside the engine. Most importantly for power reasons- an artist can work with a normal map in Photoshop or Crazy Bump and import it, or they can make a hi-res model in ZBrush and import it, and it will look better than if it were automatically generated. In the latter case, automatic normal map generation can't create a hi-res normal map for you, and in the former case, it takes very little time to generate a "standard" normal map using nVidia's Photoshop tools.

So while it sounds cool on the face of it, I'd rather Torque focus their efforts elsewhere. That's just my own two cents.