Sad to hear that you have such a bad experience.
Im not from Giants, just another modder myself, so cant give you an "official" reply, but then getting a reply from Giants on this forum nearly never happens afaik...
In relation to your issue:
The first response I can totally understand. If it is a placeable, it should use the placeable shader and not the vehicle shader.
The second response also has me confused. Why they are telling you to use a vehicle shader on a placeable I dont get.
Sadly mod reviews seem to be quite different depending on which person does it, or at least thats what it seems like...
As for normal and specular maps, you should definitely have normal and specular maps for your building as they do add a lot of detail. In general you should always have normal and specular/vmask textures for any model you make for the game, regardless of the shader used. The one exception to this is vehicles that use the material system built into the game. Basically the game has a number of predefined textures (painted metal, chrome, rubber, etc) including normal and specular maps and you can make use of them by moving the UVs of the relevant faces into a specific location. Where as normally you would have all your faces in a single UV square (coordingates 0,0 to 1,1), you can move your UVs or parts of them outside of that into other "UV squares" so to say, and with the vehicle shader each one of these has a specific material mapped to it. So eg UVs in the area between coordinates 1,1 and 2,2 have one material mapped to them and UVs in the area between 0,1 and 1,2 would have a different material mapped to them.
The colorMask attributes in the vehicle shader can then be used to set the color of eg the painted metal predefined texture. This is how vehicles with color choices in the shop work. The color you choose in the shop gets applied to one of the color mask attributes of the vehicle shader. This changes the color of the UVs in the corresponding area. UVs in other areas are unaffected...
All of this however only applies to the vehicle shader.
Afaik the placeable shader does not have access to these predefined materials.
For your placeable building, which is NOT a vehicle, you should therefore be using the placeable shader and a set of diffuse, normal and specular/vmask textures.
Creating a normal map for your texture is usually pretty easy. Many image editing programs have ways to do that relatively automatically. I am using Paint.NET for pretty much all image editing I do and it has a plugin available that does normal maps. With that its just a case of opening the diffuse texture and clicking on the plugin. The plugin then generates a normal map for the diffuse texture and allows adjusting of a few values. Then just save as a _normal file and convert to dds...
Specular/vmask is a bit more tricky to do, as for those there are no simple one-click tools available, as the information cant really be taken directly from the diffuse texture. In the specular/vmask texture each channel has a separate meaning and they also differ between vehicle and building. So eg for vehicles the blue channel determines how dirt settles on the vehicle, which is not a thing for buildings, so the blue channel in a specular for a building does something else.
You want a "unique" normal and specular map for a building, because it doesnt really make sense to use one for a different building. Normal maps are used by the game to make something that is actually a flat surface look more 3d depending on the texture. So eg on wooden beams or planks the normal map will make it appear to actually have a rough 3d surface with like cracks etc while the normal map for a metal surface is much different as the metal is more flat and uniform. So using a normal map from some other building would look very weird unless the UVs of your building happen to line up exactly with what the original building had. The specular/vmask controls the smoothness and metalness of the UVs, so how reflective and shiny it is. So that would also look very weird if eg a part of your building that is made of wooden planks ends up with a specular for glass or chrome, as you would have the wood texture, but it would be super shiny and reflective.
So in summary, I would definitely advise you to make normal and specular maps for your building and use the placeable shader.
Hope I could help
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