PLAYING WITH NORMAL MAPS

[monoblau]

I just experimented with some Normal Maps i created out of textures from Cinema4D with the Help of NVideas Normal map Creator Plugin for Photoshop 

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[beber]

Very nice work and really interesting renderings !

[leen de jager]

Its a nice  effect, though it has nothing to do with reality.
We can generate normals from any texture with the plug-in, but, whats the use of it?
This is an airplane, not something for bees to put their honey in.

[cibrut]

... not even talking about drag such paint would produce

 

But hey, i got it, we need to have fun and in sim we have bit advantage of doing stuff which would be odd or dangerous in RWL

[Tail Dragger]

Can you make a Diamond plate with that method? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_plate

 

[leen de jager]

Generatiing normals is no big deal.
No need to have any skills.
Take a picture from a diamond plate from the internet and open you paintprogram with the normal-plug-in..
Choose the option "creat-normal" click and you are done.

Making normals representing real aircraft skins is something completely different and really complicated.

Just generating a normal from any pictire is childs-play, so simple.

I generated a normal from a diamond plate for you.
Took a picture from the internet.
Opened it in GIMP with the plug in and made the normal.
It took me 45 seconds, all together.

The example above is a normal made with a pictiue from a real diamond-plate.
Better results can be achieved by painting a grey-scaled diamond plate manually and use that texture to generate the normal from.
When we do that we can say we actually create the normal ourselves.

 

[cibrut]

53 minutes ago, Tail Dragger said:

Can you make a Diamond plate with that method? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_plate

 

Like leen said.

You can even make a comfy flying sofa!

(those are only quick applied different normal textures and would definitely need a lot of love and tweaking to make it look good):

 

Have fun with normals!

Cheers.

[Tail Dragger]

Thanks Mr. de Jager and Mr. Cibrut. But I am not an artist. I was just looking for a practical application for these method. 

[cibrut]

5 minutes ago, Tail Dragger said:

Thanks Mr. de Jager and Mr. Cibrut. But I am not an artist. I was just looking for a practical application of these method. 

I think this is rather technical than artistic . Simply try put an request in Paint requests and someone will handle it, maybe. It is a bit different between to quickly put some texture like i did with some mapping artifacts etc. and between making it look good, it takes a bit more time ...

[monoblau]

I am using Sprite Illuminator , a tool for 2D Game Developers to give their 2D Charackters or Landscapes a 3D Illumination - you can manually edit the deep and the heigh of the normal as well as the smoothness and other settings. Its quite simple too, but cost 39 $ - the reason for me to use this tool is the fact that you can eport normals without background

[leen de jager]

We  need normals for airplanes , not for  cooky-jars , the Dewoitine shown above looks like one.

[monoblau]

But i am a cooky jar designer and need normals for cooky jars - so you have to use the power of imagination to figure out how it could work for your belongings  

[monoblau]

[cibrut]

... and that's what i am talking about. Life itself can be serious enough, so we can afford to be a less serious in our beloved sims

 

2 hours ago, monoblau said:

I am using Sprite Illuminator , a tool for 2D Game Developers to give their 2D Charackters or Landscapes a 3D Illumination - you can manually edit the deep and the heigh of the normal as well as the smoothness and other settings. Its quite simple too, but cost 39 $ - the reason for me to use this tool is the fact that you can eport normals without background

It deserves dark gold color or rather brass (to make fine color contrast with base paint) and i think i'll be fine.

 

For me, all of that above, this is beautiful contrast with people who only fly existing paints and existing registrations on existing routes ... Meh, a bit boring, if you ask me.

[WalSch]

6 hours ago, cibrut said:

For me, all of that above, this is beautiful contrast with people who only fly existing paints and existing registrations on existing routes ... Meh, a bit boring, if you ask me.

I completely agree. Folks, don't take life too serious and least of all your hobbies.

"How sad a life must truly have been,
if fun and joy it has never seen.
A life soon be forgotten from all,
if once the final curtain has fall."

Cheers, and have fun in whatever you're doing!

[Kerbaugh]

Hi monoblau,

I've been bragging on you for another use of normal maps that I think should become a standard. I'm not at home now where I can check specifics but at least one of your liveries for the Bf-109 shows a possibly very important effect. The normal file makes the skin of the plane seem to sag slightly between bulkheads. It doesn't sag much so the effect might not be noticeable on a matted finish but it makes a noticeable difference in the reflected image.

The effect seems to be produced by a gradient in the alpha channel of the normal file as one moves away from the lines but I don't really know because I don't have a really good image editor. I told Mike Wilson that I'd make a screenshot of what I'm talking about so I'll post that over here when I get home tonight and create it. I think it would benefit a lot of developers to figure out how to do that in general.
--
Gary

[leen de jager]

Hi Gary,

Its not impossible its in the 3D model itself.
Everyting shows beter visible when the surface is glossy.
When its not in the 3D model its in the normal file and most likely in the top-layer and not in the alpha.
Read question/answer nr 13 in the Painting FAQ and read about undulation, it will give you an idea how it works.
A sag between bulkheads can be animated the same way.
Its just one of the many ways normals can be used,  not saying its simple.

[leen de jager]

Hi Gary, ( you wrote " I think it would benefit a lot of developers to figure out how to do that in general".

 

To give you a more precise answer to your question , I studied an aircraft -paint Monoblau made. (Brumfiste Copper for  109) 

The "sag between bulkeads" you see on the plane is made by the normalfile (colored top-layer)
Its caused by the use of gradients of blue or green  ( as discribed in the FAQ under undulation )

When you have a closer look at the airplane you`ll see that on one side ( I think its the right side) there is no sag,  on the right side the skin between the bulkheads is rounding (out)
On the left side of the plane the effect is different , there the skin sags between the bulkheads.
Very good visible is this phenomena at the rudder blade.

Where does this strange effect come from??

When making the normalfiles we must keep in mind the normals are made with imaginary light coming form above.
In this case the left side of the plane is in an upside-down position on the texture/normal.
Its clear the normal-effect will be reversed on that side.**

Its vital to make normals for all parts having these parts in the realistic position during the processing of the normal..
Its not possible to make correct normals when parts of the textures are in upside-down or rotated under an angle on the texture.

Stays the question: What was Monoblau`s intention.
Did he want to make the skin rounded or sagged between the bulkheads , or did he want to have two different skins on both sides?
Most likely he made  ** the most made mistake in making normals. (quiet common in payware , having flipped textureparts, too )

The right side of the plane with the rounded skin between the bulkheads looks a bit odd,  the undulation of the plates is on all spots exactly the same and a bit to much ,wich makes the plane look like a quilted jacket.
It looks funny  anyways.

I hope this explains enough.

Back to your initial question Gary
I am confident most developers already know ( or at least should know ) 
Making normalfiles ( or bumpmaps if you prefer ) is nothing special ,we do that for many ,many years.
Doing it the correct way is something else.

Leen

 

[khamsin]

As X-Plane use tangent space for normal maps, I don't see why normal maps look weird in inverted flight.
 

[leen de jager]

@Khamsin

In inverted  flight normals wich are made correctly show OK too , you are right there.
Normals wich are made upside down however , do not show up correctly.  (no matter their position , inverted flight or not)  

[monoblau]

If my English skills are sufficient to mean what you are talking about, then it is quite simply a homemade mistake by the developers, because i used their normalmap. This is caused by the fact that the Normalmap has been created from the finished texture - and Normals unfortunately do not know which parts are arranged upsidedown on the Texturmap and which do not. Leen is right. The light always comes from above. I only increased the effect because I reduced the transprence to create more shine. If I was not such a lazy person, I would have mirrored the right side of the normal texture fuselage and elaborately cut out the different elements and turned them around. Or i would have made my own Normal map out of the paintkit,

[leen de jager]

 I think I did not explain clearly enough.

 

Can you send me (to my private e-mailadress) the original default normalfiles wich come with the package ?
 

[leen de jager]

Thanks for the original file.

OK I see what you mean.
You used the original normalfile and did NOT add the undulation to the skin.
The fault in making this normal was not made by you, its was there by default.

As I said its the most made mistake in making normals , even developers of expensive payware do it wrong on a regular base.
And almost nobody notices it and only a few care.

[Kerbaugh]

Sorry, I'm going to double post but I want to involve people on two threads.

You may have looked between the jetport and hatch to see the skin of the plane you were getting on but I'm sure everyone here goes to airshows so we've all seen the skin of a plane up close and they are highly variable. I've seen some rather wrinkly skin on planes but rarely is it really smooth and regular in shape. On airliners it tends to be pushed out. The skin doesn't hold the pressure but it must help because it often looks like it's been pushed out from the inside.

That hasn't mattered so much before but I believe the situation has changed radically. As wrinkly as the skin gets, it's still only a few micrometers out of place. If the finish is completely matted, with no reflection, one couldn't see those tiny undulations of the skin. In fact, no matter how high one set specularity in X-Plane 10, no amount of reflection would make variations in the skin readily visible, because there's no real reflected image. Now, in X-Plane 11 there are reflected images, which means that reflected photons are correlated through their source. If imperfections of the skin reflect photons in a slightly different direction, after those photons have moved a distance, their displacement in the image becomes noticeable through comparison with the rest of the image. Anyone who knows about the grinding of telescope mirrors can tell you how tiny imperfections can be detected that way.

The simplest form of reflected image is a highlight, which is the reflected image of a very bright source of light. The reflection of that by a cylinder turns that source into a line along the cylinder and we will look at that in a second but first I'd like to look at the reflection of a line. Consider the reflection of the wing of the Bf-109 in the image below. The reflection of the boundary between the top of the fuselage and the sky appears as an undulating line, suggesting an undulation of the skin of the wing!

Now let's look at a highlight of the sun on side of the aft fuselage of the 109, pictured below. The highlight is actually the image of the solar disc and perfectly smooth skin will would reflect that as an extremely elongated, flattened ellipse. Zooming in would make a section of that highlight look like a bright rectangular ribbon but look at the highlight on the aft fuselage below. A sag in the skin between bulkheads appears to stretch the rectangle forward and back from the middle, pinching the rectangle into an hourglass or dumbbell shape!

We all recognize the shape of the surface of cloth-covered wings. As the cloth is lacquered and then dries, it shrinks and essentially shrink-wraps the ribs. That's the shape a metal skin would tend toward to minimize stress. That would cause the metal to sag a little between ribs.

On the other hand, metal can be stressed. Unlike rubber, metal doesn't have to be deformed far before it fails to snap back to its original configuration. I've noticed that the skin of pressurized aircraft often bulges out slightly with age. The need to minimize weight means that the pressure hull inside the skin is the least amount of metal that will resume it's shape so the skin is necessarily stressed outward.

The point is that the skins of real aircraft are subtly rather complex and X-Plane has just added the means to detect that subtlety. Now that reflection can produce an image, the uniform reflections of a featureless skin will stand out as unrealistic. Just as all aircraft developers have had to put rivet lines and seams into normal files, I predict that they will soon have to add some gradients to produce the effects of slight non-uniformities in skin shape.

Monoblau has said that the gradients in the normal files of his liveries for the Bf-109 came from the original normal files that came with the aircraft. Therefore we have MLAeroDG for these impressive reflections. I created a shiny version of the 109 to enjoy Monoblau's fancy metalwork and that's when I noticed the subtle skin shape. I'm thinking that those unusual circumstances are the reason that I'm the only one to notice so far. I believe that the next time a developer does that with a shiny skin, others will notice the added realism. Of course I plan to make sure that other developers try it, even if I have to learn how to produce the normal files myself and sell them on it.
--
Gary

[leen de jager]

I agree , more developers should use the possibilities in XP11.
But as I said before , the 109 by MLAeroDG is not something really amazing or special ( franky said the skin of the real plane never shows its plates like this and is much more flat)There are already many liveries for various airplanes provided by several painters including normalfiles giving the same effects.
I am confident other developers are already aware of what can be made, there is really no need for us to tell them.

They only have to learn how to do it  AND whats more important, they must be willing to invest more time (money) in the graphic aspects of their planes.
When a plane is almost ready, they start painting and making normals in great haste because they want to see the Dollars in the bank.

screen shows Beechcraft( STMA)  with undulated skin.( original plane was without undulation , hobby-painters [AFN and LdJ]  added the undulation and improved the normal )