Wait somebody thinks tf2 IS normal?

"I was studying walls" Yea that's a normal person thing to say.

So that's why TF2 walls look so good.

9:08 there's actually a single dynamic light source in TF2 (that I know of)! The Dragon's Fury fireball

That's why the walls look so bumpy I wanna eat them

"I was studying walls." -LED and his fans looking for the pressable brick in the wall leading to a secret passage to a secretsociety (we are schizophrenic.)

ssbump is in essence pre-baked shadows information, not a real bump map. It was abandoned because it only works properly on static geometry.

Fascinating topic, but there are two things I'd note about this video: - Explanation of bump maps here is incorrect, bright areas on the bump map don't reflect more light back to you per-se, and you can see that in the video demonstration too. Bump maps have the same meaning as height maps, bright means higher "ground", dark means lower. And for bump-mapped lighting you don't really care how high or low the texel is, you just care about the slope. Flat white area will reflect the same amount of light in the same way as a flat black area. What you need to do is to sample the neighborhood too and compute those slopes, and get the normal, and then you light the pixel from there. That's why bump maps are pretty much completely phased out, normal maps just give that end result directly from a single sample. You can technically save some memory since bump map is a 1D value (so you can use just a single channel), and normal vector is 3D (so you have to use three channels, i.e. RGB (or possibly two with more math)), but it isn't worth it these days, we can afford normal maps memory-wise and it's just simpler and quicker overall to deal with them. - Not completely wrong, but the file size comparison near the end is not the most relevant one. When they're saying their technique isn't requiring more memory, they mostly mean they're not using additional textures or additional channels, it's still RGB, so in GPU memory, where they'd either be uncompressed or compressed with fixed bitrate, they would be of exactly the same size. PNG isn't a GPU format, and is very content-sensitive. There is something to be said about hard drive memory too, but that's usually not the focal point in such graphics papers.

Don’t worry! I’ll fix it! *proceeds to 3D model every brick and detail in precise polygons*

“TF2 isn’t normal” We never fucking were and I’m proud of it

vtf textures aren't just jpegs like. Apart of texture images for each mip level, they contain reflectance value and various flags that indicate how Source engine must interpret them. vtf can also have different compression method.

tf2 fans are starting to become insane considering how much they've toughed it out without an update for years and it just began to show. worrying.

we have reached pinacle tf2 content, walls are now the most interesting thing to talk about. Great video as always btw

TF2 players are so starved for content that they've started studying walls.

Indeed it it strange, unique even, unusual to some

this is what happens when a fanbase has been starving for years

“TF2 is not normal” *Well I gathered as much*

1:50 Source 1 uses VTFs while Source 2 uses vtex. Its the same thing, its just that Source 2 gives you an editor to make these automatically rather than manually. Source 1 has a community tool called VMTEditor which is really useful for creating materials and I've never written a vmt by hand in ages.

Blend modulate texture is used to indicate how to alter texture transition on map displacements. This allows keeping small details between transition, like for ex. rocks between sand and stone.

I like walls

Hampter

🤓 what 6 years with no updates does to a community

I'm so glad you finally got around to talking about that damn wall, LED

your bump map example needed to have its colors inverted. for some reason it rendered the colors the opposite height of what they were supposed to be.

"we typically use things ike PNGs or JPG" Well, no. That's only input format to engine. (And JPG shouldn't be EVER used in gamedev, and using JPG should be treated as crime.) Game engines internally use rather GPU compatible compression format like DDS. VAT and Source2's VTEX are also DDS alike format.

The size being the same is probably because they can use the same amount of channels and be the same size as normal maps. When an image is compressed with DXT it will always be the same size (based on channel count and pow2 texture size) in compressed form (ignoring additional compression such as LZMA)

Source fans are sucking dry absolutely every pixel in every Valve Source game until they release a new game and do it again.

Man I was WONDERING if they were normals! Bc I don't remember source games using Normal maps o-o

if you make a map with ssbump textures, add reflections for metals, and make the displacement relief more realistic, then the map will look better

I remember learning about ssbump layers from scruffy's pikmin model trivia video. You are my second youtuber to touch on the topic :D

The bump map explanation was weird, true that it affects normals but bright or dark pixels don't inherently make those areas have more or less light. Just saying bump maps store height information would've made more sense, sounds fairly intuitive to me. Overall good video though, I'd like to hear more details but then it wouldn't be 10 minutes, so fair. Also, the example of a bump map in blender looks right, but am I going insane or is the grayscale brick texture is actually an ambient occlusion map instead of a bump map...

I remember messing around with ssbumps when I was working as a level designer for Pirates, Vikings and Knights 2 source mod. They worked well on organic textures like cliff, sand and weathered down bricks, but wouldn't work on a flat texture that had well defined elements on it, like a clean metal surface with rivets for example. In this case the self shadowing would only look good if the light came from one of the three specific directions that align with the direction of the shadows in ssbump texture. Otherwise it would just make a messy blend between the main shadow positions resulting in an extremely unnatural surface.

I love this mans channel, keep it up!

Tf2 isn't normal and neither are us, the players

Ssbump maps are fantastic, they compute faster and are smaller than having three images for AO, Bump, and Normal maps.

I was not expecting the topic of this video to be what it was but I'm all for it

last time i had heard of ssbumps was 11 years ago, never understood how they work and forgot about them, now it finally makes sense!

That's not what a bump map is. A bump map is just a height map as you later said. It's a texture where white pixels represent high points and black pixels represent low points and the game engine internally generates a normal map based off this information. The white and black pixels do not represent pointing "towards" or "away" from anything. It's just height information. The way the game generates normals from this height info is as follows; if you have a single while pixel on an otherwise black height map, the game will see that white pixel as a hill and on the generated normal map it will generate normals pointing north on the pixel north of the white dot, south on the pixel south of the white dot, east to the east, and west to the west, making it so the surface where that white dot would be would appear to have a single small bump on it. If you use an all black height map or an all white bump map they will both look identically lit and perfectly flat. This is because the game doesn't care about the objective colors of the pixels on these maps. It just cares about the difference between neighboring pixels and assumes a slope between high and low points.. Edit: To be honest your description of what a bump map is and this video you linked both seem unclear to me so I actually don't know if we're talking about the same thing or not. Here is what I understand a bump map to be: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pMyRgrNjnK2-ZYk.html You were talking about skewing normals towards and away from "you" where I assume "you" is the camera and I don't understand bump maps to be doing this. “This is done by skewing the normals towards and away from you” I'm not really sure what that would mean. If normals are being skewed away from the camera, what direction are they being skewed in? Maybe we're talking about completely different effects, I'm not sure. You'll have to watch my short video and tell me cause I could just be wrong. I don't know how bump maps work in source or if they're different from other engines. Also I can't reply for some reason.

SSbumpmaps are also used a lot in L4D and L4D2, it looks good when lit with a flashlight, they are good for nature stuff like terrain, rocks and the like, not so good for small details or repetitive patters, the main problem they have is that instead of having light information in 4 directions like normal normal maps they have 3 using the rgb values, and they divide it using the 0 to 128 for the shadows, so half the range of detail, it also makes the texture look darker and the shadows also can overlap on parts where you need detail if illuminated by other angle.

Fun fact regarding 9:25 ; On Rotunda, the blend texture used for the oil shader in mid caused a ton of issues just before release due to the fact that the oil was shiny, had a $blendmodulate, and used SSbump. This wasnt an issue for most players, but DX8 and players playing without reflections enabled broke the shader completely. We had to make some fallback materials, brand new normal maps, and a lot of slamming our heads against a wall to fix it just before release.

in a way this would have been a predecessor to PBR textures as we know them today. just trying to squeeze extra information into the limited number of maps that could be used for any one texture...

Great video as always. I don't think their is a youtuber who talks about the stuff you do!

4:55 hehe “balls” I can hear javid9x in my mind saying “shut up”

This is a fantastic little documentary on a little known and under appreciated piece of game development industry history. Excellently done!

You're only realising it now?

you know the game needs content when were talking about walls

I was expecting this video to be about the community and got a really interesting technical explanation instead. You've earned my sub

This is one of the greatest things about KZfaq (ignoring all the terrible stuff about KZfaq), which is finding hyper specific and detailed breakdowns on essentially any topic that could hold any amount of examination or objective critique. Has to be my favorite genre of creator.

I believe the ssbump was discontinued due to the fact how pbr works with AO, and secondly using ssbump the engine had to calculate the cross product of X and Y that is the RB channel, which is not that huge but again it saves gpu an extra step Sorry for bombarding comments on your videos your videos are interesting :)

2:10 i like the sound of that. Has a nice ring to it.

I do a lot of custom texture work for tf2maps, and generally SSbumpmaps require more authoring and custom work to get 'looking good' than just a normal map, so they arent really used that often. Hell, even normal maps themselves tend to not be used as much in tf2 due to unintended overdetailing, instead relying more on baked in detail like seams and cracks.

Very informative video! Congrats!

why they dont bake it already so that they dont need to put shadows on it or bump map effects?

“I discovered something weird” Yeah some weirdo is staring at a wall, that’s what’s weird

Normally at the top of the screen it shows you what class all your team are but it isn't there for me is there way to fix this

We are so dried of major updates now we are discussing brick walls. Truly a mental asylum of all times.

I’m actually curious how to set up using normal textures in tf2 since I use a lot of custom textures from other games when making maps and a lot of the time they come with normals

One of my favorite TF2 KZfaqrs right now :)

Whether it was intentional or not, this title is a fantastic pun.

0:00 When you're still procrastinating your life away after 10k hours of TF2.

What no updates does to a community

The normal map being more intense than the ssbump is more likely to be a result of artistic intent rather than due to the formats. In all the 3D software I've worked with, there has been some way to multiply the normal intensity which allows the artist to fine tune the look of the material, and by having the default normal intensity be really intense, it allows for less information to be lost when multiplying. Also this is the first time I've heard someone call a height map a bump map, though I also don't use hammer.

Cool vid! Does Source 2 use bent normals by any chance? SSbumps were designed to get a similar result in Source, they're mentioned briefly in the SIGGRAPH paper you show in the video. I'm wondering if they just started using those since modern software suites easily bake them, they're actively supported and used in UE at the least. One note, to my understanding ''bump map'' became the umbrella term for height maps, normals, and possibly some other stuff like displacement maps (not entirely sure on that) etc when height maps were no longer the only type. Somewhat similar to how normal maps are a colloquialism for tangent space normals because its a mouthful, bump map is sort of still a colloquialism for height map even though its not incorrect to say e.g ''normal bump'' on a technical level (3ds Max uses this to specify normal maps) but its definitely a bit confusing to work with and understand old Valve stuff since some terminology is, while not incorrect, a bit outdated. In TF2 as an example phong and exponent being used in place of specular and gloss which can be unfamiliar and throw some people off.

"i was studying walls" What 6 years of no updates does to a game

Read the title, saw the thumbnail and I knew you are gonna talk about textures.

"I was studying TF2's walls the other day," Yeah, apparently the players aren't normal either.

I like to think ssbump map just stands for source spaghetti bump map

Valve always pushed, created and generally developed new technology. This is one of the (if not the) company you want to go, when you look for a genuin creative think tank, who makes the bleeding edge of technology and actually turns it into a healthy, usefull and just good product for people.

What 7 years without update does to a man.

Took me half the video but I see what you did there with "TF2 isn't *normal*"

Whats up with this comment section? Did any of you guys actually watch the video???

I love videos like this, keep it up so interesting, you are so cool LED

Little correction about bump maps: they represent the height of a pixel relative to the surface of the mesh. Pure gray is 0, white is out and black is in. The program then interpret that data to show how light and shadows interact with the object

they knew what they doing

Damn, I really like the SS now !

That's SUPER interesting!

valve should sign this man in

Portal 2 also uses SSBump

Wait the tf2 brick texture is a painted on brick texture from half life 2?

Interesting stuff, thanks

4:28 he publishes academic papers on his Twitter?

good pun

6:11 is there actually photoshop files or how did you know it was made this way. Thank you for the video big fan of the artstyle

1:07 wait what? I thought vertexlit generic only used the model's root vertex for lighting, seeing as baked lights cause the whole model to either fall into shadow or be lit.

Is it possible to hack a VMT for a physics prop to use per-pixel shading?

this game really needs an update dog bro is out here studying the damn walls

Interesting... There is another way to do this, materials from Quixel Megascans have Roughness, Occlusion and Displacement on one texture each occupying its separate color channel

This is what happens when a game doesn’t get updated for 7 years. I love this

You're telling me ssbump doesn't stand for "Super Smash Brothers Ultimate Mario Party"?

The title of this video could be talking about literally anything in the game

title of the video: "TF2 isn't Normal" as if tf2 was normal in the first place (it isn't)

But if ssbump acts as a normal map with ambient occlusion integrated without increasing file size, would it not be better than using a normal map and an ambient occlusion map like physically based rendering does? What advantages does physically based rendering have and is it possible to use ssbumps with it?

"I was studying walls the other day" Valve has abandoned this game so long ago hour long videos about the shortstop and.. this is our standard of content.

You got bored on tf2 one day that you went out of your way to study the walls?

The wall update

it's interesting but hsrd tp follow. i couldn't tell which wall you were showing muvh of the timr. dome lsbels would improve it

“Tf2 isn’t normal” “Every 60 seconds a minute in Africa passes”

"TF2 isn't normal" The entire game depends on a cow cutout to function

This video was very useful thank 👍

“tf2 isn’r normal” You’re telling me that wall DOESN’T have a normalmap?