Unusual Normal Map generation in landscape plugin

[ed.meekums]

Hi guys, we are having an odd problem with normal map creation in the landscape plugin tool.

 

When we generate normal maps from our source files (.png, also tried as .tif), they output a greyscale image in rgba format with an alpha map.

 

Any idea what we might be doing wrong?

 

Thanks,

 

Ed

[silent]

Hi Ed,

 

This is very interesting. Could you please give us some step-by-step guide how can we reproduce this behavior?

 

Thanks!

[ed.meekums]

Hi Silent,

 

Our goal is to reconstruct the original Washington version 1 scenery (including height, diffuse, spec, and normal maps, as well as detail masks) for use in Unigine version 2, adopting the new methods. To do this we have downloaded the source data from USGS and other sources, and are working with worldmachine on a subset of this to test the process. In this example we are importing a single height map using the landscape plugin to create a 1x1 landscape. (this is to demonstrate the image format output of the plugin and is not necessarily to scale.)

 

Attached are the source normal map and the source heightmap files we are using to create this test. This is just one of many tiles that make up the terrain. Also attached is a screenshot of the settings used to create the landscape node and the settings used to import the source data. The landscape_import_settings.jpg file also captures the view in the editor.

 

I have attached the coarse normal map for the terrain (terrain_n.dds) as well as a few of the refined normal map tiles.

 

As you can see the height map imports correctly but the normal maps are output as RGBA with the same value on all channels (resulting in a greyscale image for the normals)

 

Please could you review the process and advise your thoughts.

 

Kind regards,

 

Ed

Attachments.zip

[silent]

Hi Ed,

 

Can you please verify that if you will change Landscape -> Common -> Normal size from 8192 to 4096 normal map will be generated correctly (RG8)?

 

Thanks!

[ed.meekums]

Hi Silent, no that didn't seem to work here is the output attached,

 

Ed

terrain_n.zip

[ed.meekums]

We've now tried this with the unigine version 1 tools and we have had the same result, is it possibly something to do with the source data format?

 

 

Thanks,

 

Ed

[silent]

Hi Ed,

 

I can see that your normal map from attahment (terrain_n.zip) is actually RG8, so, I assume that it is a correct heightmap (two component heightmap for runtime).

 

You can check it with imageview tool from <SDK>/bin or directly inside Unigine Editor.

[ed.meekums]

Thanks Silent,

 

attached is one of the terrain_n.dds files from portangeles.

 

If you open this in photoshop (with nvidia .dds plugin) the result look quite different from our version.

 

thanks,

 

Ed

pa_terrain_n.rar

[silent]

Hi Ed,

 

This texture was compressed to ATI2 format. You can compress all your textures in Landscape -> Common -> Compress. At the end all your RG8 normals will have ATI2 compression.

 

Thanks!