Compatibiliy for future features? *edited - y00tzisms...

[y00tz]

While creating the CTP, I knew I had to make the regular textures as well as the 4x high-resolution textures, but what about new technologies?
I would like to keep the CTP compatible with any new features we might implement, but is it possible?  For example, if we're going to ever add bump-mapping, is there something I can do as a texture creator to allow for my textures to utilize this feature?  And furthermore, is it practical to do so?


Cheers and thanks,
y00tz

[Apocalypse]

I think it's practical don't know how though.

[jitspoe]

Bumpmapped textures really have to be created from the ground up.  They don't work too well with photo sourced images.  Say you wanted to create a door, for example.  Your average door with bevels in it.  You'd have a diffuse map, which would be almost solid white (or whatever color you wanted the door to be) with a little bit of color variation -- maybe some dirt and whatnot -- then you'd have a normal map which contained the normals (RGB colors translate to XYZ vectors) of the surface.  The normals would be straight up for most of the surface, but they'd be angled off to the sides on the bevels.  This is often done by creating a 3D model of the door then using a program to generate a normals texture.  You might also have a specular map, which controls the glossiness on a per-pixel level.  And finally, if you're doing parallax (sp?) mapping, you'd need a heightmap, which is a greyscale image indicating how much each part of the texture sticks out.

[Deranged]

For ease purposes I'd reccommend storing the height data for parallax mapping in the alpha channel of the normal map ^_^, that's what I did when I was writing my glsl parallax tests