Bump mapping a texture in Paint Shop Pro
Required; Nvidia DDS Utils (not going to tell you where to get this or what to do with it as Rebecah already has here
Ok. First thing I am going to do is have a go at the Sims modding community!
The term "re-colour" is completely incorrect and something that was invented by the first Simmers that started to modify the game.
The actual industry term for this practice is "mapping" - Now.... there are different types of mapping which many of them you will of heard but may not of known what they actually are.
By combining several of these maps you can create a final texture map.
This is an example of Maxis's terrible flat textures (found in build mode)
Less than a minute later here is the same texture with a bump map added to give it some sort of depth and finer detail.
[Please bear in mind that I have resized by 50% to post it here so definition will have been lost from both examples]
And now on an object mesh:
This can be applied to any texture but it does take some tweaking to get certain textures just how you want them.
This is how we do it.
First we need a texture. Preferably seamless if you want to use it for anything useful. You can either make one See here or grab one of the many available on the internet or steel one from game as I did.
It is good practice to make your textures 128 x 128, 256 x 256 or 512 x 512
(smaller and larger sizes or even a mixture following 8 bit rules are also possible)
If you followed Rebecah's tutorial earlier and grabbed the Nvidia tools you have all you need to make "Normal maps"
This is a "Normal Map"
Or do you? Well we can check this because with Nvidia tools comes a handy "NormalMapFilter" tool.
You will find it here;
If it isn't where it should be and you have Nvidia tools then don't panic! You probably have PSP in a different path to the expected one.
Nip to the next post if you don't see it as Rebecah has kindly posted a download that you can pop into your PSP plug ins folder.
I'm guessing by now we're cooking with gas so let us press on.
I'm not going to go into all the different maps you should be using to make a professional game quality texture but I am going to show you a few.... take a deep breath.
A. Colour map (this is the original flat texture)
B. Normal map (this is sometimes called a height map)
C. Occlusion map (for this tutorial this will give us our depth)
D. Specular map (adds shininess to the bump)
There are several more we should be using but not for this tutorial (some of them are Alpha, diffusion, displacement and parallax maps)
Enough I hear you cry!
Ok we're going to start with our colour map (some texture you found on the internet) - I'm going to use this one;
Now. It is good practice to have two of your original textures open at any one time so select your colour map and press ctrl + c then ctrl + v. Minimise one of them and the other is the one we're going to work with.
This isn't strictly the way this should be done but I think it will be the easiest for now and it still works to a degree.
Go to the effects menu and select the nvidia tools normal map plug in and follow these settings;
Press ok when your happy the settings are the same as mine and you should be looking at your normal map. Yes I know it's blue. Not only blue but a horrible blue.
We need another 2 copies of this so ctrl+c, ctrl+v twice
You should now have 3 copies of our normal map and your original colour map in front of you.
If you haven't then go get another cup of tea because you obviously hadn't had enough yet.
Occlusion Map
Ok select one of our normal maps (the blue one) and then go to the "Image menu" and convert it to Grey Scale. Now stay in this menu and convert it back to 16 million colours.
This is where we have to bow down to the bad programming of Maxis (DTX formats do horrible things to normal maps) and do something a bit different.
Go to the "Adjust" menu and select the "Brightness and Contrast" option and play about a bit until you get something like this;
Specular Map
Ok select one of our normal maps (the blue one) and then go to the "Image menu" and convert it to Grey Scale. Now stay in this menu and convert it back to 16 million colours.
Back in the "Adjust" menu we want to go to "Colour Balance" and select "Negative Image".
Again go to the "Adjust" menu and play with the "Brightness and Contract" until you have something like this;
This time we have a negative brightness and a higher contrast - This will highlight high ridges in the texture.
Now we have everything we need to make a reasonable bump map for our texture and this thread is getting rather long. We shall continue as a part II for erm..... Part II
Plug-Ins.rar
