normals and an AO pass would look great on an already quality asset
always nice to see some-one take the time to scale their brick textures correctly
Normal maps, yeah, if it's needed on an item, but as for AO, I'm surprised to hear you say that, especially along with your comment about the brick scale.
To bake ambient occlusion into the brick texture would be foolish unless using a huge texture, simply because scaling the brickwork correctly (which was more important to me) would result in any shading of the brickwork to be repeated, which there are plenty of examples of in Trainz.
AO is a must for realistic rendering in Max, but unless you go mad on the amount of textures you use in a realtime game (or you overscale the brickwork to avoid the shaded pattern repeating), then the alternative is to put up with relatively clean patterns, but at least without the tell-tale repeated shading.
I know which I prefer, and based on your comments about the brickwork, I know which you prefer.
Shoving multiple over-sized textures down the GFX card pipeline to get the result you speak of is not something I'd recommend to anyone.
I'm well aware of the visual benefits of Normal Maps and AO (along with Photons, Global Illumination, Indirect Illumination, Final Gather, etc).
I should be, I've used them for long enough.
But anything you add to the texture is going to be repeated and look just as odd as over-sized bricks.
But thanks for the "positive" comments as usual.
Smiley.
