Looks like plastic wrap from photoshop!

Plastic I can do




Note: Plastic doesn't have a reflectance with the own material color. It's usual plane white.

The problem mostly is, that gray still results in a white reflectance color. Maybe that is an issue of the lighting model. An issue I will have to look at later.

Hehe, that is a decision of the texture artist, not mine. I just choose vanilla textures as an example, because everybody knows them.

P.S.: It is not an engine, just a wrapper from d3d8 to OpenGL plus some changes. I plan to release it for everyone as soon as I think it is polished enough (which will take some time, since as always I have other projects in parallel + university stuff).

P.P.S.: I am not finished implementing rendering techniques. Parallax mapping etc was just the start

Initially I was really looking forward to FW:TOW dx9 being released for vanilla just because of the normal mapping, but after having a tinker with a few vanilla models in their old demo I wasn't so keen anymore, I think the textures are too small and don't lend themselves to normal maps very well either. No doubt someone with a lot of time on their hands and some good skills can do better than I did, but would be a lot of effort so good luck to you!

I tried using models from X3 and spaceforce however, and the results were awesome, so as with FW:TOW itself, with the right material it's all good

If anyone has actually managed to make any of the vanilla models look good with normal maps etc I'd love to see some pics.

Yeah, I was going to write smth. like Sizer said. Usually a texture artist would create them for you. I still hope there is a way do generate good looking ones per algorithm, though (and yes I have been experimenting with it for a long time).

The previous normalmaps were generated based on an edge detection algorithm. If I don't do that the look is quite different. I also scaled down the impact of the heightmap a little and changed the specular exponent.





But I don't plan to experiment with the values all day At least I think it doesn't look that much like plastic (but that is rather subjective).

The weird egde in the last image on the left is a problem with the model conversion. I know what it is and how to change that, so don't wonder.

Looks cool Schmackbolzen, pretty neat. I like making textures, so if I get a chance I'll make you some. What would you need if I did?

On something like this, with the vanilla or vanilla style textures, the major paneling, the big shapes, should be on the normal map. The smaller plate details, the generic repeating ones, should be done via very VERY faint appearance on the normal map, and plate-style specularity. What I mean by that, is that on the specular map, every plate should have a hard edge and varied specularity, similar to the plating in this image -



By heavily varying the speculartiy between highly reflective and matte, you can create additional depth information without overlapping normals, which look really bad, as demonstrated by the earlier screenshots.