@quirkychirps Uh, oh, damned! A lot of time has passed since I did the re-mapping for q3dm6. So I’m really sorry, I can’t remember what I exactly did! Even more worse, meantime I tried to upgrade to Win 10 which destroyed my HDD, so most of the work was lost!
Anyways, what I can still remember:
- It was a remapping project I made (maps from scratch), not a re-texturing project (you can see this on the 2nd screenshot I posted above, I use patch meshes for the light trim for example).
- The textures had a size of 2048x2048.
- The textures was tweaked with photoshop (.tga) but converted to .dds format (which decreases loading times a lot).
- Iirc I used normalmaps (bumpmapping) for nearly every texture, only for a few textures I used parallax mapping. When using parallax mapping don’t raise the height too much, the texture will get smeared. So personally I decided to use bump-mapping for every ‘roughness’ for ~1-2 cm. For every roughness of more than 2 cm - 4 cm I used parallax mapping, and everything above 4 cm I made it a real ‘roughness’. I mean I draw a polygon for it (either by the geometry brush, or by the map model. Doom 3 uses other values, even ‘deep bumps’ are made by bump maps. Thats why Doom3 looks weird when you see walls etc. from a very steep angle).
- In any case I simply used all shaders with the values as described in the opengl2 README file https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/master/opengl2-readme.md.
- Afterwards I had to tweak the shader a bit, but the result was outstanding! Really! I was so impressed that personally I thought that the maps even look better than UT3 or other games of this time period!
- As already said, converting TGA textures to DDS texture format was essential (do converting them to DDS afterwards, never do the actual texture work in DDS).
For example loading a very detailed q3dm6 map (with less brush count, but many, many more models took me 27 secs, when using TGA textures, using the same textures converted into DDS, it took me 11 secs (and this was done on a machine from 2009!). - Even with the maps and textures still available on my old HDD I stopped working on making maps for renderer2 because:
A. I was told, and also realized to myself, there was not really much interest in making new maps for ioquake3 those days.
B. I ran into a very strange problem: Even if I still think that opengl2 is the best idtech3 renderer I ever saw (yes even ‘better’ than Xreal) it has one very huge ‘neck-breaking’ problem: you can either use the very well lit sunlight and shadows for outdoor areas (which look really amazing), and/or you can use the old way of lightmapping for indoor areas. As experienced mapper, you will remember that Q3A never had detailed map shadows (even when using ydnar’s q3map2 techniques, shadows are either very blurry, or very jagged!)
This is because there is no real time lightning/shadowing! At least I never found a good mix of using lighmaps and sunlight. Probably the best thing is to first decide if you want to make maps using r_sunlightMode 1 or 2, the maps look definitely different when using 1 or 2 (see the Opengl2 README for more details).
Than, after you decided what value to choose, be aware that outdoors there is always ‘summer’ and there is no ‘cloudy or rainy day’, which means you always have relative sharp shadows. On the other hand, you’ll never have accurate shadows indoors (as you know from Doom 3 or Xreal). That is because lighmaps are used (normally) with all the bouncing sunlight from Q3A default lightning. If you are interested in really nice looking maps you will know what I mean. The good thing is most Q3 players are not interested in beautiful maps, they are even turn off textures at all, to play with 500 FPS or so…, so probably maps don’t have to be that good at all, I don’t know! So why is this a problem after all than? Well, when making textures/maps it’s really hard to get good results when you don’t really know what lightning/shadowing you will apply to them! At least for me this was the hardest thing, sometimes the texures/indoor areas were too bright (without (Doom 3 like) real-time shadows) than they were too dark…
Well, after all I wish you good luck to find a good way to lighmap/shadow your map, at least as long as you are also a pedantic map-maker (like me). If you only want to have textures with higher resolution and bump/parallax mapping than follow the Opengl2 README.
Ah, and something important at the end, it seems since 2015 the opengl2 renderer changed a lot concerning specular mapping (bump/parallax mapping?)! See this thread: Change to specular maps?
I don’t work for opengl2 atm, and I only reacted on your question because you directly asked me, so probably I’m completely out of date!
The most active and professional opengl2 user I know is ‘AndehX’, maybe ask him about bump/parallax mapping. Nevertheless, I can confirm the things he said about opengl2 renderer nowadays…
And another small hint: don’t use multilayered textures for you re-texturing project, they won’t work! Or use this patch: https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6058, than multilayered texures will work correctly, blended terrain still NOT!
Well, sorry that I can’t really help you with all this stuff, I know how hard this is!
EDIT: Yes, a comrade of mine said it was a black and white image, but not like a specular map with all the details, instead it was a very raw, or basic texture drawn in black and withe! It was possible to do parrallax mapping and bump mapping with two different textures at the same time (shader)! Btw. I was told that I used code/texture from urt_bumpy(?) https://code.google.com/archive/p/urt-bumpy-engine/source/default/source bump mapping).
Tbh, I can’t confirm all this, but it might be correct!