Website running again

The FsDeveloper website is online again, but I had to disable the download section for the moment. It was the script from the download section causing the server load. It seemed someone from China was calling this script very often. Until I have found a solution for this, the download section will remain offline. I will try to install the latest version of the download script tomorrow, to see if it helps.

 

Some normal map tricks

I do promise this will be my last post about normal maps for today, as I finally got them to work as I wanted.

Due to the way MS has written their shaders, some special care is needed when constructing your normal map texture. If you just use the plugins that are made for it, the shading of your object will be wrong in FS. So take these steps to get the correct result:

  1. First make sure you have a bump map for your texture
  2. Convert it into a normal map with the plugin
  3. Copy the content of the red channel to the alpha channel
  4. Make the red channel black
  5. Invert the green channel
  6. Make the blue channel white

Now you can use your normal map, simple add it under the bump map slot of your material and save the DDS as DXT5. It is important to use DXT5 as it has an 8 bit alpha channel and also keeps the quality of the green channel quite good during compressing. So this will mean the compression does not hurt your bump map too much.

So it means a little work when making your normal map, but I can understand why MS made the shader like this. It ensures we can use compressed textures, without the quality of the bump map being reduced a lot.

 

How normal maps work

For those of you that are trying to understand more about the normal mapping (or bump mapping as it is called in the gamepack) that can be used in FsX, have a look at this nice tutorial. It helped me a lot in understand more of the principles behind it.

At the moment I am still figuring out the last bits of how it works in FsX, but after that I hope I can write a little article about it.

 

Cool idea to create normal maps

As you might have seen in the forums, I have been playing with bump mapping for scenery objects lately. While I was searching the web for a little more information, that might solve my shading problem as mentioned in the forum, I can across a nice tutorial that shows how you could create a bump (or normal) map for an object. I find it a pretty cool idea, I only think it will not be very practical to light a building from multiple sides just to make your normal map.

 

Working with FwTools

I have added a new article to the Wiki that explains how you can use [FwTools] to create GeoTIFF files, which you can use for your photo scenery. There might be other tools to do such tricks, but I am familiar with FwTools as I use it at work. And besides that it is a open source project, which means it is free to use. So therefore I decided to make a little article about it.

The article describes how you can add positional information to an image and how you can reproject it to WGS84 if needed. Hopefully the article is useful to some of you and I will try to expand it with other useful information when I find some more.

 

Still alive

I know I have not posted that much lately on my blog, but I am still alive. Unfortunately I did not have that much time the last weeks to explore the nice things I want to post about, but that seems to be changing again now.

Last weekend I finished a new build of Library Creator XML 2.0, you can find it in the forums. This version still does not have all the features of version 1.0, but the features it is missing are less important for FsX anyway. You should think about feature like API macro export. I will try to add them back as soon as possible, so that version 2.0 can become the new stable version.

Besides that I have also found some more time to explore the new options of the GMax gamepack. I have been playing with using bump maps, details textures, reflections, etc. Once I have got a clear picture on how to use them, I will probably make a new article on the Wiki to tell you about my findings.

Now that I am talking about the Wiki, I do have another Wiki article in mind, it will be about creating GeoTIFF images for resample. I often see questions about this on forums and I think it would be useful to have a tutorial about this, as having a GeoTIFF images, makes creating your scenery so much easier.

So keep an eye on this blog, as I will post here once I have more interesting findings or once I have added one of those articles.

 

MSN

For those of you which whom I sometimes talk on MSN as well, you might have noticed (or will notice) that I am moving my contacts to another account. I have a few reasons to do this:

  • The first reason is that I have two accounts since the time I was studying. I then created one account I used when I was on the university and another one for all the flightsim contacts, so that they would not disturb me while I was writing my thesis. Now that I am working there is no need for two accounts anymore (I am not online during the day anymore), so I am going to merge those two.
  • Besides that my MSN address still used the scenerydesign.org domain, so I thought it would be nicer if I made a new MSN account with fsdeveloper.com in the address as well.

So that is why I am moving all my contacts around. You have been warned now. And to prevent loads of spam on that email address, I’ll not write it down here, but you can find it in my profile at the FsDeveloper.com forums of course.