Achieving rivets Thread - UT40K: The Chosen mod for Unreal Tournament 3

Hey guys im having some trouble getting my head around normal mapping these rivets onto both my chimera and basilisk(yes ill make a chimera WIP thread soon).

When geodav says normal map the rivets on; does he mean the black-and-white image called a bump map? Or does he mean the actual blue, green and purple normal maps(the one that use the high and low poly version of the model)?

The blue, green, red map. UE3 supports them, and they look very good when done correctly. Just make sure you put it into the normal map channel.

Just make a small sphere, cut it in half, and then arrange them around the panels of the hi-poly tank. They don't have to be attached, as they are only there for the normal generation process.

Alternatively, you can make a heightmap of a rivet (black-and-white bump map), convert that into a normal map, and then overlay it onto the normal map. I'm doing a similar thing with the guardian. I didn't want to sculpt an intricate fabric pattern into the hi-poly mesh, so I generated the normal map without that detail, and then overlayed a fabric pattern onto the "cloth" parts of the normal map in Crazybump. I must say, it worked like a charm. I'll post some pix later.

Edited by: Ministry_3D

You can even make normal maps in your 2d app by making them in 2d, then using a plugin to convert them into a normal map. If you're already making a normal map anyways though from a high poly, then you might as well add the spheres.

Yeah i just had a go at Ministry's sphere idea, that was my main idea that i was gonna try. I also had a go at the black-and-white bump map, and it looked horrible, so i think ill stick with the normal map. And yes micah, ive done normal maps before lol, i know which slot to put them in lol. Heres the results:

Normal map method:

(Click to enlarge)

Bump map method:

(Click to enlarge)

As you can see in the normal map method the rivets actually look like they protrude from the mesh, which is what i was looking for. The holes in the normal map were caused by cage errors coz i was too lazy to fix them and i was in a rush. Of course, in my final version, i will do the cage properly to ensure no holes lol, this was just a test version of the model.

You can also notice there is a few funny looking rivets, what causes this? I used a 2048x2048 resolution, so i dont think that is the cause.

How many polys were on the bolts? It looks good on some, but as you said, some of them look kind of funny.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to insult your intelligence (with the map channel), but I wanted to make sure.

Lol thats ok, umm the rivets were 32 segments, but were only semispheres, so im not sure if thats still 32 segments. But they were all 32, so if one looks funny, shouldnt the rest?

try moving the light source and see if they all look like that

Those look pretty good, the normal mapped ones I mean. The weirdness is probably due to the rushed cage. Hard to tell from here though.

Yeah i guess so, well thats probably how ill do the rivets then. So now i need u guys to go back to my imperial basilisk thread and check it for any errors before i start doing this normal mapping, then ill try and texture it too.

And then the mighty IG basilisk will be ready for duty!