minetest auto normal mapping

[pithy]

Random poll!

[azekill_DIABLO]

idk maybe... but it may need some modification to the core...
except if you talking of the blue tand violet .png in default/textures

[paramat]

The auto-generated normalmaps look bad though because they only react to brightness, so are often unsuitable for the texture.

[TumeniNodes]

The auto-generated normalmaps look bad though because they only react to brightness, so are often unsuitable for the texture.

Are there any changes regarding this planned for the next release (or future)?

[paramat]

It can't be fixed, it's impossible to decide what 'height' a texture intends for a pixel from RGBA information, for example bright bricks with dark mortar versus dark bricks with light mortar.
In fact auto-gen should be disabled it looks so bad.
In MTGame we refuse to add normalmaps for every texture because that makes texture devving and modding so much harder. We would also need to change the textures for use with normalmaps, which means they would then look wrong when normalmaps are disabled.
So normalmaps are for use with a dedicated texture pack that has textures and normalmaps designed specifically for each other, as here.

[pithy]

How does minetest make the normal maps look so voxelated?

[azekill_DIABLO]

idk... i does not looks voxelated with hdx pack. it looks ugly

[ExeterDad]

How does minetest make the normal maps look so voxelated?

Regular images need several pixels to transition smoothly from one color shade to another. Normalmaps are very much the same way. They are merely images. The shade of the pixel in the normalmap is translated to "height". So if there aren't many pixels in in normalmap image... the height transition is abrupt, and makes it voxelated as you described. Normalmaps for HD textures can look extremely good as the normalmap texture is likely HD as well.