D2X-XL Forum

I have created a sort of 'ice glaze' texture that I am going to use for my project, but have some questions about the HAS and Normal textures that would be attributed to it.

Here is the post on Imgur that shows the texture as it looks in the editor as well as the .png file for the texture itself:
https://imgur.com/a/6utHzYP

My idea is to have it conform to whatever texture it is used as an overlay on - like it's a thin layer of ice on a specific area itself. Basically it's to be a glaze that just kind of covers other stuff.

The ice texture was extracted from the original D3 .ogf file by D3 Image Tool, which has a tendency to convert specular parts to be transparent, thus the image had decent amounts of transparency which suits well to being an overlay 'cover' for another texture. I had also scaled the converted texture up with an AI upscaler and modified the alpha levels a bit too.

I'm wondering for the use of having it conform to the texture it is on how the HAS and Normal maps should be for the purpose.

Let me clarify a few things first: Do you understand the concept of a normal? Let me explain: A normal is a line, or rather a vector that is perpendicular to a plane. Each pixel of a texture has its own normal, which denotes the angle the pixel lies at compared the texture's plane. The normals control the lighting and shadowing of a texture, per pixel. You can have sharp gradients between pixels, giving hard lighting and slope changes, or soft ones. Ice should rather have soft gradients.

HAS means height, ambient occlusion and specular. Height is how far each pixel sticks out from the basic plane the texture lies in. AO is darker areas in cracks, to help shading the texture and give a stronger 3D impression. Specular is how shiny it is - the higher the specular value, the stronger and also more focused the light reflection. More focused means whether you have a soft, wide shine or distinct bright spots.

You can either create all these maps manually or with some online tool, or use e.g. Claude and give it clear guidelines on how to interpret a texture - while the further will be coarse and potentially unnaturally looking, the latter will produce close to perfect results after a few iterations.

D2X-XL will combine base and overlay textures' nhas information, making the ice covering the base texture in a natural way (that's at least what it has been built to do).