This is directly related to my Blender scripts, but could get to be rather involved so I've made it a separate thread. I'm working on my Blender scripts, getting to the point where I'm correcting specific problems. I notice that the bump/normal maps aren't working. Hmm. This was something that took me some time to get right in rF1 and I thought it would carry over into rF2. But it hasn't. Now, I noticed the other night that my tangent and bitangent values weren't being stored in the vertex data. I corrected that situation, redid some GMT's, opened the dev mode of the game and... no joy. Hmm. I've looked through some of the appropriate DDS's from ISI and noticed that car body bump maps are gray scaled with alphas. Bump maps of other objects are the typical blue color. But even those of blue color don't work for me. I even exaggerated them for effect. So, this thread is both for technical requirements in GMT's and requirements for DDS's-- especially the gray scale with alphas. Specifics for the GMT's would be along the lines of "is there a bit flag that needs to be set for bump/normal maps?", and, "if, so, where?" for starters. I know this is open ended and perhaps Skype or a Google Hangout might be a better way. However, I figured I'd start here.
Hmm i don't know about blender but i bake my tangent space normal in 3ds max with y-up and it works with 'bump sepcular map T1' shader, ohh and i do export max smoothing in exporter as i keep my smoothing groups organized properly for baking, with hard edges splits, smoothing group for UV shell.
Welp, setting the cube level texture flags to $0020401A got both the reflection and normal maps to show up.
