[RELz] Bumpy Textures - Costumes, Armour, Shields and Helmets Texture Replacer

I have edited some of the textures so they mimick bump-mapping and yet retain the specular maps.

All models and textures are made by Taleworlds - I have only increased the resolution and applied a few filters in Photoshop. The results are not 100% consistent (some items look better than others), so please backup your original files and pick only the textures you like in the end. I have not changed any of the heraldic items (shields, armour, etc.), but most of the other wearable items (please let me know if I missed something).

To install, just copy the content of the archive in the Textures folder in your M&B install folder.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I have doubled the resolution for all the included textures, so an FPS drop can be noticed on older system. After using these textures for more than 50 hours of gameplay, I have not experienced any noticeable FPS difference on my 3 years old system, with a NV8800GTS GPU.


Download here: Bumpy Textures

Screenshots:

Great cant wait to try it out!

Great cant wait to try it out!

Can you upload some screen's, please ?

pasterz861 said:

Can you upload some screen's, please ?

Click to expand...

Screenshots added...

Looks awesome! Great work! Every small graphical improvement helps

Aldwen said:

Looks awesome! Great work! Every small graphical improvement helps

Click to expand...

Thank you! I wished I could've done real bump mapping AND specular - but I couldn't find anything that'd really work, so this is a good compromise, I reckon...

Cheers,
PKR.

Really good work indeed! 

Thank you for sharing your eye candy! 

Best regards!

Tried it out and - as you said so yourself - some of it looks good and others not so good.
Especially the leather jacket (open, black one with white fur and a belt). It looks a bit 'cartoonish'.
But overall I think it's really good. Adds a little depth to the otherwise plain textures like dresses and leather.

lucky lancer said:

Really good work indeed! 

Thank you for sharing your eye candy! 

Best regards!

Click to expand...

Thank you! I know it is not perfect, but it's a decent substitute...

Adorno said:

Tried it out and - as you said so yourself - some of it looks good and others not so good.
Especially the leather jacket (open, black one with white fur and a belt). It looks a bit 'cartoonish'.
But overall I think it's really good. Adds a little depth to the otherwise plain textures like dresses and leather.

Click to expand...

Yup, all true, thank you for a frank opinion. The problem is that the filter works well for certain textures, based on contrast, colour level, etc - while for others it is not so great. However, most of them are looking better than just the doubled-resolution with no filter, so I decided to apply the filter for them all, for the sake of visual unity.

Oh, btw, my favourite change is for the helmets...

Oh, helmets... I tried it out in my own mod - that has no metal helmets 
Must try it again  - it's hard to tell how it looks from the pictures.

Adorno said:

Oh, helmets... I tried it out in my own mod - that has no metal helmets 
Must try it again  - it's hard to tell how it looks from the pictures.

Click to expand...

Aye, it worked best with mildly polished/rough metal surfaces, such as helmets, shield rims, steel and lamellar armour. Worked also well enough with canvas clothes, some of the leathers too. Not so great for maille and furs.

The thing is that it worked better with some of the items which are using shaders (even the maille's rougher looks is enhanced by the shader, to the point where the texture doesn't look so bad). So all the metal thingies look better than most of the others...

Painkiller_Rider said:

I wished I could've done real bump mapping AND specular - but I couldn't find anything that'd really work, so this is a good compromise, I reckon...

Click to expand...

chack those out
http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/topic,1016.0.html
http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/topic,1577.0.html
mtarini successfully implemented custom shaders with all the stuff working simultaneously.
Dain Ironfoot got it all working in 1.011 AFAIR

GetAssista said:

chack those out
http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/topic,1016.0.html
http://mbx.streetofeyes.com/index.php/topic,1577.0.html
mtarini successfully implemented custom shaders with all the stuff working simultaneously.
Dain Ironfoot got it all working in 1.011 AFAIR

Click to expand...

I saw those (though it seems the website is down now), but I'm not sure it is exactly what I was looking for. Bumpy Textures are a simple solution for something that should've been done in the first place by the developers, using already old bump/normal mapping technology. Probably one of the reasons bump/normal maps were not used for the equipment (costumes, armour, weapons, etc.) is that the GPU will have to handle too many textures at a time, so the FPS hit will be quite big (my GeForce 8800GTS 320Mb is still struggling when battling in the woods...). Or maybe it was simply left out due to lack of time, or whatever...

Either way, my goal was to achieve an illusion of bump mapping, by using Photoshop's tools (which I also succesfully applied in one of my Morrowind mods) - which I think I did, to a certain extent... A compromise, as said... Should you (or someone else) be able to point me to a mod uploaded here which is using bump or normal mapping, without altering the game engine, and/or introducing new bugs, I'll gladly take a look at it - and get some things done (I can make decent normal maps, too... ).

Cheers,
PKR.

I used this and it looked good but my performance was definitely worse when using the mod so I had to remove it. My computer handles 500 man battles okay but the textures brought my framerate down when I was just fighting about 20 sea raiders. Not sure why this is, I have a Radeon 4850 512mb version if it matters. I'm thinking since I use HDR mod, Zaro Graphical Mod 2.5 and the Panoramic Mod 2.0 my computers Vram might be going over... suppose performance would get a good boost if I bought the 4890... hmmm.

Sculelos said:

I used this and it looked good but my performance was definitely worse when using the mod so I had to remove it. My computer handles 500 man battles okay but the textures brought my framerate down when I was just fighting about 20 sea raiders. Not sure why this is, I have a Radeon 4850 512mb version if it matters. I'm thinking since I use HDR mod, Zaro Graphical Mod 2.5 and the Panoramic Mod 2.0 my computers Vram might be going over... suppose performance would get a good boost if I bought the 4890... hmmm.

Click to expand...

Well, I've never tried a 500 man battle, but then again, my GPU is weaker than yours, a Geforce 8800GTS with only 320Mb Vram. I am using a few graphical enhancements in my game, including a few high-poly models, but I don't use the HDR mod and the Panoramic mod, since I felt also some fps drops when I did.

In other words, my textures should work fine with your 4850, though you may want to tune down other things to keep a decent fps. Try to deactivate one mod at a time and compare results. One thing that is awfully optimised in this game, for instance, is the trees, so any battlefield sporting trees is a disaster on my computer (framerate<5fps), so my guess is that the way the engine treats models (not textures) is the biggest problem in this game...

Cheers,
PKR.