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999cop

What does it mean that textures are models?

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I'm not really a tech guy, so I need to be filled in

I was wondering if there is a difference between the structure of Doom 3's textures and Half Life 2's. The only thing I have learned about Doom 3's textures is basically all what Nilson said in the Legacy video that they will be all models(supposed to be 3D I assume?), very hi-res. At first, I assumed that they will have depth, definable edges, with shadows casted on in real time and everything. While Half Life 2's textures are "materials", which they each will have their own property assigned for weight, consistency, etc. Textures will react physically and audibly to the way in which players mess with them however they want to. However, aren't Half Life 2's textures still considered 2d except that they are supposed to seem more real, and Doom 3's textures are actually 3d with depth and properties. Perhaps this is why Doom 3's graphics are supposed to be better than Half Life 2's.

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Not to be rude or interfere, but since this is a techy topic, shouldn't it be in the Tech forum?

To my eyes, the HL 2 textures are more like typical pre-Doom 3 textures (but with material specific code attached to each).
But as far as D3 goes, I don't have a clue what it means that "the textures are actually models".
I'd understand it if they say "the walls and wall structures are models", but isn't textures the graphical layer you put on walls? Doesn't Doom 3 still require art to denote the materials for the surfaces?

I believe a few people out there tried doing some mapping stuff in the D3 Alpha (without releasing it of course) - what observations did you folks make?

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Textures are perfectly flat, but they contain extra information that makes it possible to render them so that they appear to have depth. The extra information is originally generated from a model, but the model itself is not used by the game.

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From what I've read on another site, textures use a bumpmap, colourmap, heightmap and a diffusemap to make the texture 3D. It uses polygons, but it's not really a model.

I don't understand it either, btw.

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The polygons only exist when the texture is created, on the artist's computer. They are then converted to bumpmaps etc.

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DooMAD said:

From what I've read on another site, textures use a bumpmap, colourmap, heightmap and a diffusemap to make the texture 3D. It uses polygons, but it's not really a model.

I don't understand it either, btw.

What's difficult to understand. First they make a really high poly model, make the texture off of it, lower the polys for the ingame model and apply the texture (which uses bumbmapping to give it the illusion of being "actually a model" in the fact that it react to light as though it were) to the lower poly model. See... simple.

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This is exactly why I don't want to make textures for Doom 3; in the same amount of time as it'd take to make a single Doom 3 texture, I could make several dozen Doom 1/2 texture instead :P

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NiGHTMARE said:

This is exactly why I don't want to make textures for Doom 3; in the same amount of time as it'd take to make a single Doom 3 texture, I could make several dozen Doom 1/2 texture instead :P

Making textures for Doom 3 is really a modelers job now.

I gotta try and learn to do models :-)

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Which type of texture is better(if any could be expressed within this situation) between Doom 3 and Half Life 2? Or is there even a difference existed there

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Fredrik said:

Since they, as explained, simulate depth whereas HL2's are flat.

Er... care to elaborate again? I can't see any explanation in this thread.

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Fredrik said:

Textures are perfectly flat, but they contain extra information that makes it possible to render them so that they appear to have depth. The extra information is originally generated from a model, but the model itself is not used by the game.

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The whole "take a high-poly model and generate a low-poly model plus normal map that makes it look roughly the same" thing. I don't know if there's an accepted term for it, APS is just what the first paper I saw called it.

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No, that's something else.

What you do for Doom 3 is reducing the polycount and storing the inormation that was lost in the transformation in a normal map and a heightmap.

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Both? That's... odd. How are they used at runtime? I can't see anything other than standard bumpmapping in the screenshots.

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The heightmap encodes the height above the surface in each point. The normal encodes the normal of the surface in each point. These values are used to calculate illumination.

Normal mapping is, from what I understand, the same thing as bumpmapping but a bit more sophisticated.

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Well, yes, but _how_ does it use both a normal map and a height map? No bump mapping method that I know of works like that.

Re 'bump mapping' vs. 'normal mapping':

The term 'bump mapping' has been muddled lately, but originally it meant 'perturb the normal based on a heightmap' - these days it tends to cover anything that perturbs the normal.

'Normal mapping' is the same as original bump mapping, but using a normal map instead of a heightmap.

There's no fundamental difference, they're both just ways of twiddling the normal.

Afaik, normal mapping is used by Doom3, Hl2 and pretty much all modern games that feature any kind of bump mapping.

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I don't know how it works down on the hardware level, I only know that Doom 3 uses both height maps and normal maps (each texture has one normal file and one height file associated with it).

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