Normal maps for games

[jsonedecker]

Hey everyone,
I am sort of new here, but have been using Vray Advanced off and on for the last 2 years. ..... Anyway, I need to make an animated normal map for a river in a game project I am doing. I have done regular normal maps but never an animated one nor anything with Vray. Here is a reference to the type of "swift" river I want to duplicate....

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I am using the latest Vray with Max6. I would appreciate any help or direction. Thanks.

-John

[dellis]

John,


Not sure if this is going to help...and i don't really know much about gaming and such but here goes.

I would use pflow to setup up the "swift river", basically emitting a wide particle stream that would run parrallel to your ground surface. This would allow you to add rocks and dips for the water to bash off of and flow over. You could then render this out with the proper amount of motion blur from a top view.....saving it to an avi or an image sequence to use as a displacement map on an actual 3d geometry.

This is the tricky part....figuring out a way to use the displaced geometry to generate the normal map. I'm not sure if you can do this in MAX 7 or not. Vray can output normal maps but i don;t know enough about using them to make suggestions. I did notice that vray output the normal map based on the displaced geometry. Hope this makes some sense...if not...let me know and i'll try to clarify.

Just for the record...i don't, nor have i ever worked in games....

Cheers!