Long time ago, I bought a scifi models pack from dexsoft.
I used them to toy around a bit

The mdl file contains a single skin which contains the color.
There are 3 additional files for
- height
- spec
- normal

Is there a single shader available which supports to use all 4 maps?

If I create my own models, should I go the same way if I want to sell them? What is the best combination for users who don't want to code at all?

more questions:

If I have a flat table and a hightmap which "extrudes" a block in the middle of the table - what will be shown at the sides of this extrusion? Or am I missing something? Is the height map just for shadows?

-- slacer

The heightmap is used for parallax mapping. This gives the illusion of bumps potruding in/out of the mesh and overlapping each other at about a 45 degree angle, but once you look at it at more than 80 degrees or so it is flat.
Nvidia also has a shader that looks even better than parallax but runs slower and bumps outside of the rendered mesh are clipped off. Both of these can't make the bumps extrude beyond the polygons that are rendered.

At the moment I could not find a parallax mapping shader that supports specular maps, but it should be simple to change the shader to support it.
There are normalmapping shaders on the wiki that support specular maps in the alpha channels of the normalmap. If you have the specular map in a different file you would need to put it in the alpha channel of the normalmap.

Hi splashmaker,

I was always unsure why there is an alpha channel in the colormap inside the mdl file, because I had to use a simple shader to get rid of the transparency of all those models.

Your posting makes that more clear to me.
Thank you

You could also give this one a try: http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=174592

The shaders from the standard shader lib support all of those.

Interesting for you: fx_specBump and fx_specParallax

Here you can find all infos about those shaders: http://manual.3dgamestudio.net/beta.htm

Warum spinnt dein Reliefmapping Shader wenn man näher hingeht? Die Textur bewegt sich einfach als wenn sie ein Laufband wäre.