Weird black chequerboard pattern on mirrored displacments

[Riever]

Dear all,

My map is symmetrical and contains displacements. On the initial build I copied and flipped one side. Now a long way down the road I became unhappy with some of the displacements so redid them for one side, deleted the corresponding ones on the other, copied and flipped.

They sew in fine but the copied ones now display a back checker pattern on running the map. They display fine in the editor.

All the displacements are using blendrockgoundwall004 and it's only those I have just copied that show this problem. Compiling with/without lighting does not solve this - though with lighting results in mad z fighting artifacts - even though there is nothing else in that area.

If I destroy them and redo manually I don't have this back checker problem - but this will take ages and I won't end up with a symmetrical map.

Any ideas?

[Mr. Happy]

Hi,
I can't launcher Hammer right now so I can't confirm this, but I would suspect that it is due to the texturing of the displacement becoming flipped as well. Try checking the World checkbox on the texture alignment sheet, and make sure the scales are 0.25. You may need to alternate between the "Face" and "World" checkboxes a couple times to fully reset the texturing.

The reason I suspect this is an issue is that the texture in question uses something called "self shadowed normal mapping" which makes pretty shadows on the texture. The technology relies on directions so this is certainly a possible bug. I'm pretty sure that's the issue, I think I've seen it before, I just can't confirm for you.

[TehStoneMan]

It could be because some of those blend textures have the incorrect bump map texture in their definition ( .vmt ) file. The correct bump map texture is generaly present, but under a different filename, so instead you get the "missing texture" chequer pattern.

To me, this seems to happen with blend textures that weren't actually used by Valve in their maps.

The way I fix it is to extract the .vmt file, rename it (usually just by adding "_fixed" to the end), and edit the texture definition with the correct bump map texture, and use my "fixed" texture instead.

[Mr. Happy]

TehStoneMan is correct. It is odd that the issue you have is only on the flipped displacements, however, looking at the material in question more closely one can see that it is looking for rockground001_bump-ssbump when the vtf is actually named rockground001_height-ssbump

The vmt file you create for his solution should contain the following:


"WorldVertexTransition"
{
"$basetexture" "Nature/rockwall004"
"$basetexture2" "Nature/rockground001"
"%tooltexture" "Nature/blendrockgroundwall004_tooltexture"
"$bumpmap" "Nature/rockwall004_bump-ssbump"
"$bumpmap2" "Nature/rockground001_height-ssbump"
"$ssbump" "1"
"%keywords" "tf"
"$surfaceprop" "dirt"


}

[Riever]

Hi,

Many thanks for this info - however Sorry I am green when it comes to the files used by hammer/tf2.

How do I examin the material? I'm guessing that this is some kind of xml text file - but which?

What's a vmt and how would I package this in a map so that servers also have the fixed version? (guessing that I have to use GCFScape to extract?)

Finally how do I get the material to point at the correct vmt - if they have a parent child relationship?

Hope you can shed some light - or point me at a good tutorial.