Question concerning the minibumps in XNALara

[Runa]

Okay guys, I've got a problem. I do know how to apply minimaps with render group 22, but this time something is not working properly.

Love2Raid already knows about this since she helped me in baking a correct minibump for this model. Anyway, the ingame character looks like this:



As you can see, there is a metallic motive over her jacket and boots, effect that in XNALara was missing since it is not incorporated with the diffuse and normal textures. When I first tried to apply the minibumps they didn't even show up with these settings: 22_meshname_1.0_0.0_0.0, so I've tried to copy the first line from a Lara model and it became like this: 22_meshname__1_30_30.003. It made the trick, apparently... and now the minimaps are visible in XNALara.

BUT!





Err... they look wrong, don't they? This happens when I play around with the lights... the minibumps look as if they were half transparent or wth, not to mention they look pretty soft compared to the ones ingame. Is there a way to fix that?

[Love2Raid]

It looks pretty good if you ask me!

I don't think it will ever look just like the in-game effect with minibumps alone, since there was also a small diffuse texture that should be repeated on the mesh, if I'm not mistaken...

You can:

1. increase the shadow effect (lights options), this will make the bump effect stronger (if you are using XNALara + new bump map shader or XPS).
2. try to use 2 minibump maps, one will be the one you already have, the other will be the same but with channels (red and green) inverted. This might help to avoid that strange 'fading' effect you can see in your pictures, but I'm not 100% sure since I've never tried it. (Repeat factor should be the same for both maps, mask map should be yellow and black.)
3. make the (diffuse) texture bigger, make another layer with that pattern on it (that's why the texture needs to be big, otherwise it will look bad), erase some parts and then multiply (or whatever looks best). You can do the same with the normal map & spec map to make the effect stronger. This will take a while.

It just depends on how much time you are willing to spend to get that in-game look in XNA.

[Bluej97]

#3 is what I always do
get the mask map of the model and use it on the diffuse
make a new layer using the minibumps
desaturate the minibumps
set to multiply/overlay/screen/etc.
edit brightness and contrast

I do that on the normal map of the model too

btw your port looks great ! *______*

[Runa]

Trying to modify diff and normal just makes things even worse >_< tried and the result almost made me sick lol.

I think I might try the other solutions suggested by Love2Raid the next time, for now I'm just not willing to spend so much time over these models that were already ported and still need a lot of fixes here and there since they are old.

Also, Angela contacted me on DA and applied a metal enviromap to fake the effect and it looks like one of those minibumps were the cause of that ugly fade effect :\ it's true though that we can't never get 100% ingame-like results, especially if the additional maps are not inplemented with the main files already.