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Textures - How to make these types of _n maps?


H1ms3lf

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Heya folks and sorry to bother!

There is a type of normal map (I think it is a normal) that I've been trying to reproduce with no success.
(For learning and maybe release a small mod).

Here are 3 dds images and its _n versions:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F1YaMK2-ErKOVLDsYBVsPsQZ6YA2lkM0

Would you be so kind as to tell +or- how to create these _n from its base image?
Specially the one for dirtrubble_n - it looks almost fully blank/transparent but does a lot of difference ingame.

Been trying to make those in paint.net with all the extra plugins, but maybe that is not the right program for this.

Thanks in advance for any help and tips!

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The texture appears transparent because of the alpha channel. You have to load the texture with its alpha channel seperated. When it comes to normal maps the alpha channel specifies the specularity, the whiter, the more specularity. When it comes to diffuse textures the alpha channel specifies transpareny, here it is the opposite, the whiter the less transparent.

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Are these alpha being generated from the regular image or from its normal map? Looked up some videos about alpha but all they do is make a selection with magic wand (for example the background around an object), delete that part and save so the image has transparency. Doesn't seem like what is needed to generate these _n files for dds textures.

 

It can't be harder than a few commands executed in the right order. Can someone teach me how to create those in either GIMP or paint.net or photoshop (rather the first 2 wich are free, but oh well).

At least to grasp the basics, after that I should (hopefully) be able to go around.

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Alphas are usually done manually, by copying the diffuse into the alpha channel of the normal map. Normal maps themselves can be done either from generating it from the diffuse texture or by baking it from a mesh. There is a .dds plugin for Photoshop which allows to generate a normal map from an image.

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Oh, I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that there are also quite a lot of programs that can generate normal maps from diffuse maps. A google search will bring up the most populars, the result won't be much different than generating it in Photoshop for example, but generally these programs have a lot more options regarding the end result.

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