Bad Company Normal maps?

[AlexanderSmith]

I've always been curious about this, but for some reason I never asked anyone.
In DICE's Bad Company games, the weapons look as if they have no normal map, but use higher polycounts instead. I can usually detect the sort of glossy fake geometry look from the normal map, but I can't see anything like that in BFBC guns.



Does anyone know?

Some screenshots. Looks like it's using a normal map like a detail map only or something.

http://www.ngohq.com/attachments/scr...reenshot-7.jpg

http://www.ngohq.com/attachments/scr...reenshot-9.jpg

[cnflkt]

They are normal mapped.

Like u said the weapons do have a lot of polygonal detail, but as us can clearly see in the screens that the textures has normal map detail for metal grain, and some other physical elements down the barrels.

A normal map doesn't necessarily have to show any additional to be useful, it could simply be used to provide a far better representation of surface smoothing.

[AlexanderSmith]

That makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

[joukejan]

I noticed the same in Far Cry 2. For some weapons they definately used some unique normal maps to make that extra detail jump out. But I guess they also used some standard metal grain and other surface definition and used alpha maps of a particular weapon on which the white areas would get the normal map applied.

[Craig Lewis]

They dont look like they have unique normal maps to me.. Im guessing it's probably to make them cheaper to render, as they're probably quite expensive to render, just because they take up so much space on the screen.

[joukejan]

I don't know for sure but is it possible they make a second UV set and only put the most important parts in it which can use a normal map. So maybe there are only 3 parts which need it and you can just scale it big time because the rest of the model doesn't need to be in that UV set. This way you can have a smaller sized normal map.

[Xoliul]

Doylle should know...
I remember from BC1, vehicles obviously did not use baked normalmaps, I can't remember for the weapons, but they might also not be baking anything out of time constraints (an efficient optimisation i might add, as it looks good regardless).

[aphexx]

you can easily find out with this tool: 3dripper
the textures just will be named cryptically.

i know from a killzone II developer, that they didnt bake weapons there. they stuffed in alot of polys instead. ~15k for one weapon.
perhaps because the ps3 bottleneck is in texturememory and not in polycount.
so it might be a valid technique to fallback to tiled textures instead to use unique mappings.

[AlexanderSmith]

Originally Posted by Xoliul

Doylle should know...
I remember from BC1, vehicles obviously did not use baked normalmaps, I can't remember for the weapons, but they might also not be baking anything out of time constraints (an efficient optimisation i might add, as it looks good regardless).

Is Doylle working for DICE now!? I remember he was doing that art test way back, I haven't been on the forum in a while...

[Xoliul]

Yeah he's been there for pretty much a year.