Quake3World

So Im contemplating taking up the art of making textures =P
I never am very satisfied with the textures others make because it's not quite what I imagined the textures in my maps should look like.

So I have some questions.

How would you go about making a basic, say, rusty metal texture or brick (or metal) wall with green slime on the bottom?

How are the hightmaps made? Are they just made by throwing in noise filters for grainy rock and whatnot? I do know that they're greyscale.

WTF is a normal map? Looks mighty odd to me. Blues and greens and reds in pastle o.O How do they work, how are they made, and what's the point?

I guess this should pretty much cover my questions for now. If there's anything else important that I missed please let me know.

Thanks guys.

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16797

bitchin

Thanks Foo! :icon14: :icon14:

Q4/D3 surfaces typically use a diffuse, normal and specular map.

Diffuse contains only colour information, no shadows like how you will see in Q3.

Normalmaps are what the D3 engine uses to extract per-pixel bump lighting information from. The red/green/blue represents each local vector x/y/z. Typically, these are generated from a 3D model, though you can create one using different tools or hand paint them if necessary.

Specularmaps represents how light reflects off the surface. You can easily create one by toying around with the diffuse and normal maps.

Optional heightmaps are like normalmaps, but they cannot represent the same amount of detail normalmaps can do since they can essentially only represent a single vector rather than all three.