Appearance of "Depth" in textures

[fume0101]

I have been trying to incorporate the appearance of depth on some retexture work I've been doing. Upon inspecting other people's mods, like Ghost11's Grey Warden Runic Armor, it appears that editing the .dds normal map formats is how it is done. But whenever I attempt this myself, it appears to have no in-game effect. For example, If I retexture a normal map to be 1 uniform scale of grey, it will still show up in-game as the original model's sections of "depth". To be clear, I'm not referring to sections of the mesh that are actually raised or lowered. I'm only referring to the normal map's raised and lowered sections. If anyone can understand my question and might have a solution, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

EDIT: Searching the web has yielded little result in any sort of comprehensive tutorial on how to manipulate normal maps. I have, however, learned that .dds normal maps are typically comprised of a combination height map, and normal map.

 

-fume0101

[nezroy]

The DA:O normal map is not in any "standard" normal map format, which is annoying. See the wiki for details: http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/Textureformats#Normal_Map

 

Regardless, if you set a 50% gray RGB with a 50% alpha, you will get a "flat" map that with no normal modifications applied. If you still see normals in-game then your replacement texture is in the wrong place or has the wrong name and is not being picked up by the game.

 

Generally you can get decently convincing normal effects for "clutter" by simply applying an emboss in two different directions for the RGB and alpha channels. For something more specific you'll obviously need to either hand-paint your normals or convert normals exported from a 3D modeler into the format used by DA:O (which generally just means copying channel data into the appropriate configurations, depending on the format of the normal map that you exported -- typically a tangent space normal map, which are the ones that look "blue"-ish, and are widely used).

[fume0101]

Thanks for the response. That is a great help. I believe I've discovered the issue. I had named my diffuse, specular, and normal textures one thing, then the .mao listed the original name for the specular and normal textures. I suspect this is a result of using the same .mao that DA Tool spits out when you click the "Save Modified" option, without editing it to the custom texture names. Does that make sense to you?