Global Illumination

[AnyOldName3]

(02-21-2014, 07:34 AM)MaJoR Wrote:

AnyOldName3 Wrote:At some point he said it wouldn't be too hard to just tag a normal map onto each shader as it is compiled (but it would break compatibility with any of the games which use normal or bump mapping already, and isn't something he's ever going to implement).

This is pointless.

Normal maps are a very very very recent addition to Nintendo's development. VERY few wii games use them - I believe skyward sword is the first (and used sparingly at that), though I have some suspicions on wii sports resort and maaaaybe new super mario bros wii. Anyway, bump maps are even worse off. Excluding tech demos, there is only one game that I know of that uses bump maps, and it has bigger problems. That leaves us with a massive gulf: from 2001 to ~2010, we have pretty much ZERO use of either bump maps or normal maps.

That means starting from scratch. Even IF there was a way to add bump or normal maps to a game's rendering via Dolphin, every single bump map would have to be created and added by hand, which is an obscene huge amount of work. And developing full-blown normal maps that bake higher polygon details onto lower polygon geometry? REALLY REALLY HARD. It would make 3D Printing the models look like a cakewalk. Ripping with UV mapping intact (hard), repairing the inevitable ripping and UV mapping errors (not fun), tesselating and fixing the errors you missed in the previous step plus errors that the original model had that tesselation exposes (really not fun), then baking the normal map and trying it out and hoping you didn't break something. Repeat the process for every single model. YUCK. There is a reason we do this during initial development and not after the fact: you really need to develop the model with this in mind, and you need access to all of the original materials used in the creation of the model.

There is the slim possibility of easy conversions by going from bump map to normal map. A normal map is depth + angles, and a bump map is just depth. So they are related, so "tagging" in the shader is a possibility. But... while you can make a normal map from a bump map, it would still just be a height map, and give a result that has none of the benefits of normal mapping. The amount of data a full-blown normal map contains is enormous, and can only be achieved by baking from a higher polygon model. And that's the process I outlined above. So there really is no point in converting bump maps to normal maps.


Long story short - even excluding the voodoo required to add bump or normal maps into a game, even if you could just press a neobrain and MAGIC HAPPENS - this is still an obscene amount of work, and you can't do any shortcuts. I would not recommend it.

I forgot to mention that bit. It would require reworking of the entire of each mesh. I must have just assumed OP knew this, although that might have been a stretch.