Quote: "I've attached one of my normal maps just for comparison, I don't see any large scale directional changes (large scale color shifts).
EDIT: This isn't by chance a world-space normal map is it? Tangent space normal maps are usually uniformally blueish in color."
Yep. It was world-space. For some really odd reason quite a while ago. I got it in my head that the lighting direction would get messed up on bumpbone.fx if world-space wasn't used. It so happened that the problem was that the shader maps were not getting loaded (due to missing D2) and when the problem was resolved it happened to be at the same time I tried world space. This is the general weakness of being ignorant LOL. I simply didn't realize that the lighting direction was top-down no matter what. I mistakenly thought that it was because it needed to know x,y,z from the normalmap!
Thanks so much for showing me that normalmap. As soon as I saw I knew the problem but went offline before being able to reply. I'm really glad because this means I don't need to bake the normalmaps anymore. I can just filter my greyscale bumpmap and it works perfectly.
Here's the same bit of map but done correctly:
And the result!
YAY!
The beautiful thing is that just being able to filter my bumpmaps is a HUGE time savings over baking.
Now tuning spec. Color spec. maps are just rad (the black is now where I want it, desert is close, woodland has yet to be touched). The shader is just brilliant. Starting to feel good about things.
OK side-note about the characters in the above pic; This is
Marine10v.A-H. The cool thing about these particular characters is that they share the same texturemap. They are intended for designers to use them as generic/filler dudes. These are also a bit lower poly/detail (3100-3300 tris ea.). You can have many minor variations but not need to store/load excess textures. This also streamlines things if you want to make a retexture because you only need to modify one map to affect eight guys. At first I worried that the camo patterns would look really bad if repeated too many times but it's not as bad as I had feared. Older/bolder patterns like woodland or DPM might look more repetitive though.
Speaking of textures, I am doing a quick remix of textures. I have decided to downgrade to 1024s because the difference in detail is obfuscated by the normal map (which will remain at 2048 for excellent detail). The only downside was that when I did that the digital camo got blurry so I need to reapply it at lower pattern scale so that it remains totally crisp.
I fully intend to be satisfied with developments come tomorrow morning. I am looking foreward to getting away from these guys for a couple days.
