TF2 isn't Normal

TF2 isn't normal, and this brick wall shows us how. 🧱

Credits:

#tf2 #teamfortress2

[aachrisg]

I invented that system, nice to see people noticed!

[MaatoAngeleri]

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

[neondead..]

So that's why TF2 walls look so good.

[MaliciousMossMuncher]

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

[yaneproduction]

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

[Pudding]

"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.)

[xDShot]

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

[TehBurek]

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.

[DrHundTF]

Don’t worry! I’ll fix it!

*proceeds to 3D model every brick and detail in precise polygons*

[baradragonsftw]

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.

[xDShot]

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.

[vooshoos]

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

[Aeten]

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.

[xDShot]

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.

[Mavon]

Indeed it it strange, unique even, unusual to some

[T.A.T]

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

[vwoop]

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

[SethTooQuick]

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.

[StickmanHatena]

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

[menacingpyro]

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