Doom textures with normal maps

Do you think that would be feasible? Pre-existing sourceport support nonwithstanding, of course. I am pretty interested in how Doom's chunky pixelart textures would look together with added depth from normal lighting. I have no idea if this could theoretically be possible to make with the existing diminished and sector-based lighting effects, or if you would have to graft on more modern dynamic lighting to the engine (does GZDoom support that already?).

With GZDoom come two .pk3's - lights.pk3 and brightmaps.pk3. They both brighten up your maps, add dynamic lighting and make walls lighter. It's a pretty neat tool.





^^ These are examples I found on G00gle. ^^

I don't think normal maps really work without a direction of light, and sector lightning doesn't exactly have any direction - in terms of the tech used in conjunction with normal mapping and such, it probably doesn't even count as lightning.

As far as GZDoom goes, while it does support dynamic lights, it's pretty simple. Dynamic lighting bleeds through walls and in general seems pretty dated. You might be able to utilize normal mapping with it, but it wouldn't exactly work like you'd expect and you'd have to work around the limitations.

Ports that focus entirely on enhancing Doom's look and renderer, however, might actually flat-out have normal mapping out of the box. Stuff like Risen3D, though I don't exactly pay attention to them so I wouldn't know.

You could not just slap a normal map on the existing textures and expect it to look good. The existing textures have shading/lighting "built-in", but for normal mapping to look good you need textures without any lighting.

boris said:

You could not just slap a normal map on the existing textures and expect it to look good. The existing textures have shading/lighting "built-in", but for normal mapping to look good you need textures without any lighting.

This is true. Look at the STAR* textures and how they have a subtle from-above lighting effect on them (which would make flipping them upside down be downright silly COUGH COUGH).

boris said:

You could not just slap a normal map on the existing textures and expect it to look good. The existing textures have shading/lighting "built-in", but for normal mapping to look good you need textures without any lighting.

That could be mitgated with some manual editing of the diffuse if need be.

I put together a very basic proof of concept by just running everyone's favorite STARTAN through nVidia's normal generator plugin, and crossfading between the fully lit and dark version using in its preview function to get a rough idea of what it might look like.

Automatic anything never looks good enough.

Quake Tenebrae did this, and it was impressive, but only at the time, and only in the way a world made of real plastic can be impressive in the age when nothing looks as real.

The plastic look is toned down using specular maps as well as being more selective over what you want to accentuate in the normal map.

Mostly using filters does not give good results. Also, I don't know if using additional maps like normal map with textures in 128 resolution have sense.

Hyper3DGE supports these features. I guess you could always try it on there: http://edge2.sourceforge.net/