Detail Maps..?

Em.

I was wondering if anyone could explain to me what detail maps are, and what material slot you would place them in(3DS Max)? I haven't ran across this type of map before. Any help much appreciated.

Uly

I'd assume it's the same thing. Hope this helps.

Detail Textures

motives

Typically a detail map is a smaller texture (say 256x256) that tiles hard across the surface of your model with a high texel density. They are used in next gen-shaders togheter with a bigger size diffuse or color map for variation. u blend the two textures togheter in the shader (say multiply the diffuse on the detail) What this gives is that when u are far from a object u see the subtle colorshifts in the diffuse and no repeating pixels but when you get close you can get reeeeally close to the object without letting it loose its small surface detail (like woodgrain) since the detail map gets more noticable.

hope that helps


Edit: looks like Uly beat me to the punch

MoP

Detail maps are usually a high-frequency tiling pattern which is overlaid onto a main texture. Gears of War used this a lot for adding close-up detail when players were up against walls. It can help disguise low-res textures.

In 3dsmax you could probably set them up using a "blend" or "mix" material, with a tiling version of your detail texture applied over the top of the diffuse/spec/normal.
If you're using the normal bump material, you should be able to put a greyscale detail bump map into the Heightmap slot, just turn up the tiling values on the bitmap settings.

Edit: That'll teach me to take ages to type a reply.

Em.

Thanks for the info. Everytime I did any combination of a search for "detail map" I got a bunch of Mapquest crap. Of course, I knew you guys would know what's up. Thanks!