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gap · 05-07-20, 08:58 PM

kapuhy's answers have been pretty exhaustive, and there is not much I can add but a few estra tips.

There is a dds plugin for Photoshop, so yes you can export game-ready textures from it. The plugin support various levels of color depth and compression as well as mip-map levels. The compression formats more commonly used in game are DXT1 and DXT5, but since you are no new to game texturing, you are probably already familiar with the different DDS export settings and their pro's/con's

The same Photoshop plugin also includes a tool converting height maps into normal maps. There is a tutoria by danlisa here on subsim which explains how to use the said NVidia tool. It was written for SH4, but most of the information it contains applies to SH5 as well (except for the blue/grees channel swap, which is not required for SH5).

There is another little useful tool called Njob that I use for converting diffuse maps into height maps, and height maps and normal maps into each other. It is very easy to use and it does his job decently but if memory serves me well, the normal maps it generates are inverted (i.e. it treat darker areas in height maps as bumps and lighter areas as indents) so you better invert height maps before feeding them in the program, or you invert the green channel in the generated normal map.

One last tip. As said by kapuhy, many SH5 units use multiple diffuse textures and/or they share the same diffuse texture(s) with other ship. Editing one of the shared textures for one ship will probably affect negatively other ships. Fortunately there is a workaround to avoid that: after reworking a diffuse texture you can save it adding a suffix to its name. You can force a specific ship to use the recently created texture, by specifying the chosen prefix preceded by an asterisk (*) and followed by the texture file extension as TextureName in any roster entry of that ship. A good example of this trick being used is stock game is the Rawalpindi armed merchant cruiser, whose cfg file in the British roster looks like this:

Code:

[Texture 1]
TextureName=*mil.dds
LightmapTextureName=data\Sea\NAMC_Rawalpindi\NAMC_Rawalpindi_AO01.dds
NormalmapTextureName=
StartDate=19390101
EndDate=19461231
Frequency=1

05-07-20, 08:58 PM	#4
gap Navy Seal Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: CJ8937 Posts: 8,214 Downloads: 793 Uploads: 10	kapuhy's answers have been pretty exhaustive, and there is not much I can add but a few estra tips. There is a dds plugin for Photoshop, so yes you can export game-ready textures from it. The plugin support various levels of color depth and compression as well as mip-map levels. The compression formats more commonly used in game are DXT1 and DXT5, but since you are no new to game texturing, you are probably already familiar with the different DDS export settings and their pro's/con's The same Photoshop plugin also includes a tool converting height maps into normal maps. There is a tutoria by danlisa here on subsim which explains how to use the said NVidia tool. It was written for SH4, but most of the information it contains applies to SH5 as well (except for the blue/grees channel swap, which is not required for SH5). There is another little useful tool called Njob that I use for converting diffuse maps into height maps, and height maps and normal maps into each other. It is very easy to use and it does his job decently but if memory serves me well, the normal maps it generates are inverted (i.e. it treat darker areas in height maps as bumps and lighter areas as indents) so you better invert height maps before feeding them in the program, or you invert the green channel in the generated normal map. One last tip. As said by kapuhy, many SH5 units use multiple diffuse textures and/or they share the same diffuse texture(s) with other ship. Editing one of the shared textures for one ship will probably affect negatively other ships. Fortunately there is a workaround to avoid that: after reworking a diffuse texture you can save it adding a suffix to its name. You can force a specific ship to use the recently created texture, by specifying the chosen prefix preceded by an asterisk () and followed by the texture file extension as TextureName in any roster entry of that ship. A good example of this trick being used is stock game is the Rawalpindi armed merchant cruiser, whose cfg file in the British roster looks like this: Code: [Texture 1] TextureName=mil.dds LightmapTextureName=data\Sea\NAMC_Rawalpindi\NAMC_Rawalpindi_AO01.dds NormalmapTextureName= StartDate=19390101 EndDate=19461231 Frequency=1 __________________ _____________________ \|May the Force be with you!\| ...\/