I just don’t know how to approach this for a character. I want to model a fox skin on a character with normal mapping. I was wondering if anyone has tried this, knows of a tutorial, important things to keep in the mind… really just about anything to get me started on how best to get the “fur” on a normal map.
I posted this here in the GE since normal mapping is becoming more prev. in the GE so this may have a chance of getting some help.
Wait, so are you making this for use in realtime, or not?
Well, if it’s for realtime use, I’d use lots of layered alpha planes to achieve fur, then texture the skin with a “hairy” looking normal/color map combination.
For use in the rendering engine, I’d use the particle system for fur, which I have never really used.
I’m afraid I can’t give you a more specific answer, because you’re question isn’t very specific, and a little confusing. I’m not sure why you’re stressing the normal map thing so much, because when I think of a way to achieve fur, “normal map” is one of the last things that come to mind.
This fur is close fitting and matted so I don’t see much use in using an alpha (the fox/wolf skin is ment to be a bed roll so Its alwaysed rolled up). Since the character is going to be normal mapped, the bed roll would look terrible if it didn’t match the level of detail / light interaction.
I think I’m going to embed a height map of the fur into a normal map, but I’m having issues seeing normal maps in the GE not sure what I’m doing wrong… (my card supports opengl 2.0 / shaders)
Does anyone have a 2.48a blend with a simple normal map applied that works in the GE, so I can take a quick look at the settings and see what I’m doing wrong. (packed textures)
Check out this guy’s site. He has an example of painting on the normal map in an image editor to achieve fine detail (treads and laces on a game character shoe). It might be a good technique to make fur.
Getting your maps to appear in the GE is tricky. Try following along here.
This has a normal map applied to the floor that works in the GE. I did pack external data, and my normal map was 3MB in the file browser but the packed blend only 220KB so I hope it’s there.
ETA: I re-downloaded it and opened it from the temp directory and it works fine. It’s an early wip but I was working on the normal map today, so timely.
set.01.blend (222 KB)
Zaerin: Yep mathis is a fine artists and I was wonder where the normal map insertion tut was on his site yesterday when I started to think about it. Its going to be a good resource. The other link you listed is the one I was staring at when trying to do this last night… and I made no head way. The render gave me the results I expected, but the GE nothing.
Averil: nope no images.
Estimated Time of arrival: I re-downloaded itand opened it from the temp directory…(so on)
Lol. Jokes. 
Are you in GLSL mode?
Are you using bump maps (grayscale)? AFAMCK (as far as my computer knows) bump maps don’t work real time but normal maps do. And they look sooo much better.
There’s a few settings, all in different places of course, that you need to get normal maps working. Try the tuts - I’m not sure I can explain it adequately. If it renders OK, make sure Game->GLSL is on. Also check the console for error messages when you start the GE.
As for making the reference fur, I’d use particle hair. To get normal maps it needs (I think) another mesh which is a single strand in the Y direction (eg. subdivided cylinder), with a particle instance modifier, which makes it follow the particle paths (so the particle display type can be set to none).
BTW this is the right forum for this question, since realtime is much different than rendering. They might want a new forum specifically for realtime…
Dave
You can find them here I’ve renamed them from my blend but you’ll have to browse to the new location anyway. The do work for me in the GE using GLSL materials. BTW I used the technique you told me a day or two ago to tile the texture as a UV map - works like a charm.
Thanks averil I think I know what I was doing wrong… there was a normal map button in the texture image section I’ve never seen or used before and that may have had something to do with it. But at least I know it works
