It looks like MDHmodder is using parallax maps in some of his youtube videos but I couldn't find any information on how or if they are able to be implemented in Morrowind yet in any simple way. I'm making a new texture pack for Morrowind (remaking high quality versions of almost EVERY texture), so I'd love to make parallax maps to go along with the new textures if there's any way to get them working. If anyone has any info on this and could fill me in I'd really appreciate it.

I would suggest you ask Vality7 - I don't think MDHModder has been active for a while, but Vality's been looking after MDH's mods.

I don't really know what parallax mapping is, but I know MDH was working on some pretty nifty stuff.

Either PM Vality here, or check out his Cyrodiil: Dawn of Oblivion forums. Better yet, sign up and contribute (we could always use your expertise!) and you might find the answers you're looking for.

I don't know if parallax is the right word, but I've seen some very very cool things over at that Cyrodiil forum.

Here's the forum link:

http://z6.invisionfree.com/TES_III_Cyrodiil/index.php

Hope this helps

I would call it layer mapping, though MDH had another word for it, something along the lines of parallax. If you were to make this for each texture in your pack, its not really possible, as these are meshes, not just a special type of texture. Its a simple trick with a mesh and a texture, and is all handplaced ingame, so you couldn't apply it to a texture pack. Its not the type of mapping that like how in Oblivion you can add normal maps, specular maps and parallax maps, its simply a mesh trick.

MDH came up with this technique after playing Shadows of Collosus and was trying to figure out a way to make grass with it. What he was doing, was he took a simple flat plane mesh, made a simple texture with dots on it, and the background of the texture was tranparent. He was placing them on top of each other to try and create a 3d effect. This didn't work out right as you get a whole lot of clipping when placing meshes so close to each other. So I took the mesh, and put several planes into one mesh to avoid the clipping. Then I took a brick texture, made it transparent between the bricks, and put them together and made a 3d brick.

The trick is simple, yet very effective. Just note that it all comes down to what you do with the texture. If you tried hard enough, you could make a solid rock with this by making each layer different, and adding a whole lot more layers closer together.

Its basically a 3d surfaces with no fps loss at all, and this one is only 4 planes per nif. This picture here, you would normally expect to see 6 polygons per brick, which in this case, should add up to over 300polys. But this entire mesh has 4 polygons in total. I did a lighting trick with the alpha also to make it appear more 3d. This was all done in Nifskope.

3d Brick trick

You can download this example here: V7_Layers.7z
I've included 3 different nifs, the first with no lighting at all, so you can plainly see the layers. The other two show examples of different lighting per layer to get a 3d effect.


I wanted to use these to cover the ground in cities, but to do this you need a completely flat area for it to work. Though you could use it to cover buildings, like castle walls to make the bricks stick out.

Heres another pic showing stone cobbles in a city


So basically, unless you wanted to make a texture with transparency for each texture (it wouldnt work with ground textures), apply it to a nif and place each block ingame onto the surfaces of buildings etc, its not really possible. This technique however is still awesome, and can be used in many ways. Phijama used a similar method to create his lightsabers for example. Its all up to what you can figure to do using a flat plane and a texture.

Then I am still a sad panda.

Thank you for the invite though Princess, but I've got way too many projects I already neglect to add another to the list.

And thank you for all the detailed info Vality... Definatley a bit more entailed than what I was wanting to do, but oh well... maybe some day we'll be able to just create new normal map textures and add "_n" to them like in Oblivion to make Morrowind use them. Your mod looks amazing though and I wish you guys the best of luck with it.

You can get Normal maps to work with Morrowind, it just requires MGE.

Download nifskope . Then ask about how to apply textures to the mesh that are parallex. You'll need to change the setting to Apply 2 or hightlight 2 or something like that. I would suggest you try and make it normal mapped and not parallexed. Parallexed is much hard to both make and to apply right. Yes people are trying it in oblivion. But to be honest I'm not sure they are parallexing right. It's not the easiest thing to do. Also just because nifskope allows you to parallex and normal map meshes. Does not mean the game engine is set up to take advantage of this. Oblivion can do both normal map and parallex map. Morrowind meshes can be made to do normal map but no one has tried to see if parallex mapping will appear right.

Before you ask your next oblivion question...The answer is no. Steep mapping doesn't seem to be in the works at nifskope yet. As steep mapping is just to new.

You can google normal mapping to learn ways of doing it. Just remember. If someone writes about it that. A. It could be outdated. or B. anyone can write anything even with almost no knowledge so when you read about things Read allot of different ways of doing it. That way you'll learn thing easier.

I'm working on a music project and resource textures for the community. This will be highly detailed and jpg. So anyone can do what ever mapping they like and save in whatever format they like. They will be free use royalty free. So both beginner and professional can use them in any project.

You'd get higher detail if you used anything but JPG.

I didn't really understand any of that. btw, what is steep mapping?

steep parallax mapping or possibly relief mapping. They both look similar to me.

I tried to use relief mapping in place of the parallax shader in obmm's nif viewer. I never managed to get it to work though.

Use targa (TGA) or even PNG if you want high resolution images with no quality loss at all. Even with maximum quality, the JPG compression algorithm is still destructive.

I personally think PNG is the best, because it isn't displayed by the engine (as far as I know, but I'll admit I didn't try), so modders using your resource pack will be all the more strongly enticed to convert them to DDS.

okay so you CAN apply normal mapping to models like architecture? that's awesome... but it required changing every single individual model? well that's not so awesome. what about terrain? anyway to implement bump mapping or normal mapping on the terrain to make those cobblestone roads and whatnot "pop" a little more?

and i think steep parallax mapping is too processor-intensive to be a viable option for gaming right now, but i could be wrong... that's just what i remember hearing or reading somewhere.

Have a read of this: http://www.niftools.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=936

Yes but with jpg I can do 100's of these at 2048 and seamless without making them 3mb each just to download.
So people can remake them to whatever them pick. The detail is in the pixel count. So yes BMP,TGA,PSD and so on are better. But DDS, GIF,PNG and so on are Not as good to work off of as they are highly compressed.So in making textures you start with a good resolution texture.Then you try it into what ever the games format is. With this being said I'm not bumping. normal mapping. paraxel mapping , or steep making. Only making them highly detailed none compressed seamless. So they can be usable as a base resource for everyone to do as the wish with.
I like the new things your doing for the game so feel free to P.M. if you need to learn more.

This is why I'm making it like this. This is both quality and mb friendly. Yes if I could make it BMP I would. But it would be hell to download a resource pack at 100MBs and only 10 textures in it.

Trust me this way is more universal to being change to what ever format people use now or in the future. This are for begin to professionals. So I can't make them dds just for this game.

BMP images are highly compressable through non-image compression. You could just zip the BMPs, and BMP images worth of 100mbs would easily go down to 10-20 mbs, accompanied by either an automated installer to decompress the files or a manual on how to unzip them and where to put them. If downloading is all that matters, then there is no problem at all.