Normal texture trick

December 1, 2010 · 1 min read

I found an interesting trick for reading normals from textures, described on the NVIDIA Texture Tools wiki. In short, it lets the same shaders use both DXT1 and DXT5 bump textures.

This matters for the editor, because the DXT5 version of a bump texture is only produced at the last stage, when the game is packaged. During testing inside the editor objects will look a little different, since DXT1 is not good for normals. I think that is acceptable.