How were the PNG images for the demo made?
by Pete Patterson · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 03/29/2007 (3:49 pm) · 1 replies
In trying to grok the new materials used by TGEA, I loaded up some of the PNG files from the test folder into Photoshop.
I can see from the material declarations in the script that many of the demo textures have a normal map probably produced by the nVidia plugin, and it's no problem understanding and creating those. The bump maps exist as seperate files, so it's pretty clear where those are and how to go about creating them.
The main image files are a bit more confusing. They seem to have some sort of alpha channel information in them, but I can't really determine exactly how they were made, and what sort of information is in the alpha channel (or whatever) that is being used by the materials engine.
My guess is that the alpha channel is the pixel specular map... can anyone confirm that?
Does anyone have any quick instructions on a good workflow wherein you can work on the extra channel as a photoshop layer and then stuff it into an output PNG file in the same manner as the demo art?
It would be helpful if the Photoshop source art used to create the demo textures were included with the SDK as an example, assuming that they were actually created with Photoshop.
I can see from the material declarations in the script that many of the demo textures have a normal map probably produced by the nVidia plugin, and it's no problem understanding and creating those. The bump maps exist as seperate files, so it's pretty clear where those are and how to go about creating them.
The main image files are a bit more confusing. They seem to have some sort of alpha channel information in them, but I can't really determine exactly how they were made, and what sort of information is in the alpha channel (or whatever) that is being used by the materials engine.
My guess is that the alpha channel is the pixel specular map... can anyone confirm that?
Does anyone have any quick instructions on a good workflow wherein you can work on the extra channel as a photoshop layer and then stuff it into an output PNG file in the same manner as the demo art?
It would be helpful if the Photoshop source art used to create the demo textures were included with the SDK as an example, assuming that they were actually created with Photoshop.
Torque Owner AcidFaucet
Photoshop + PNG Alpha Channels = PITA
Photoshop + TGA Alpha Channels = Not so PITA
On your channels question:
Ummm, it's the channels palette, right there on the main UI. You add a new channel and voila, you can paste into it and everything, generally easier to work with it as a normal layer first and then copy and paste the contents of the layer into the alpha channel, then set the layer transparent, and then spit out your PNG TGA or w/e.