I did a quick tutorial to show off the speed and efficiency of 3dsmax 7's Render to Texture features and the DirectX viewport shaders.

Take a look at it over on CGChat (I'm currently lacking webspace, so I had to use attachments).

http://www.cgchat.com/forum/showthre...;postid=196134

Enjoy!

MoP

Lol...damn you Mop, you beat me to it...once I finished with my Smoke Elemental for the challenge I planned on writing one up...oh well, I can still do painting for normal maps, and radial aniosotropy (yes, thats right, I think I have an idea as to how to do radial aniostropy and possibly some other weird effects, like caustics, using normal maps...just need time to figure them out and try them)...

Really nice tut though [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]...someone needs to still write a maxscript for this as some steps are reptitive...grrr...

Btw, pointing out that DX texture previewing in viewports is unavailable on some materials (such as double-sided)...at least as far as I can tell...

Nice tut Mop! I assumed this was how Normal Mapping would work in 7, but have yet to upgrade myself. Your final resulting model doesn't looks so hot though honestly...
It just looks a bit blurry, although perhaps thats the new mip-mapping problems Im hearing about in Max 7...

Scoob: Yeah, the model was just done in about 20 minutes to test out the features for myself. I think the blurriness is a combined result of the texture being non-square (I don't think Max likes 512x256 textures, it tends to chop them down a lot) and the fact that I scaled down the screenshot in Photoshop.
Trust me, with a few coloured lights and a specular map thrown into the shader too, the results are much more impressive. I need to try it with something more detailed, like a character's face, soon...

MoP

Looks good mop. I'll have to try that out. Messing around with the ati normal mapper, just makes me feel dirty. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

nice tutorial mop, but one quick correction. the best low poly cages never poke through the high poly model. but at the same time be as close as possible to the high poly surface at all times. having the meshes intersect is the worst possible situation because the normals have to reverse direction, and that looks butt cause it is reliant on the resolution of the texture and can look really pixelated. Its one of the reasons silo's draw topology brush is so cool, because it keeps everything inside the high poly mesh, but keeps the verts sitting perfectly on the mesh surface.

Where does this idea come from that the low poly cage should not poke through the high poly? My meshes haeve been intersecting for years and I've never had a problem with it, though I see several people making the same claims as you do, poopster.
The max7 normal map generator only fires rays in the direction of the lowpoly surface and is totally unusable to me.

ive found, no matter whether im using the ati normal, the proprietary normal generator at TRI, Kaldera, or orb, that whenever the mesh intersects, it can create a hard line in the normal map, because of change in direction. It doesnt happen everytime, but I've yet to figure out what specific instances it is ok, so I have always kept mine on the inside.

I'm not sure if it's an issue of wether the mesh goes under or over. It's knowing in which directions your normal mapping tool shoots it's rays and how far those rays reach.

Our new TRI normal mapper shoots rays in both direction, and we can adjust the length. This works great because it doesn't matter if it's under or over.

Though, poop brings a good point in that you should pick one and try to stick to it as best you can. Either try and stay on top or stay underneath.

Per: Why not expand the Projection modifier to take the parts of the high-poly mesh "outside" the low-poly cage into account? Does this produce different normal-map results to having rays cast both towards and away from the low-poly mesh?
In the tutorial I posted there, the "nuts" on the wheel hub stick through the low-poly mesh, but I edited the Projection cage to take that into account, and it seems to render down to the normal-map and produce the correct result.

Poopinmymouth: No, I think it's ok in Max7's normal-renderer to have intersecting mesh edges. If you're getting hard lines in the normal map, you can turn on Supersampling and it will look right.

I've never had any problems with pieces sticking through the low-poly mesh, as long as they don't go TOO far. And I reckon building a low-poly cage to entirely cover every part of a high-poly model would result in the low-poly mesh looking too "bulky", if you know what I mean. I reckon you should build the low-poly cage to stay as close to the average surface of the high-detail mesh as possible, regardless of whether this means the highpoly is sticking a short distance "through" the low-poly or not.

I will experiment some more with an organic object like an arm, and see what the results are like.

MoP

http://www.cgchat.com/forum/showthre...;postid=196379

Per128, Poopinmymouth, Skanker: Would you care to check that out and tell me your thoughts?

The low-poly mesh is both inside and outside the high-detail model, and the resulting normal-map seems perfectly fine...

Per: I cannot see why you say Max7's normal-mapper is "totally unusable"! From what I've tried, it gives equal or better quality, more consistent results than either ORB or Melody, without any raycasting problems regardless of whether the highpoly mesh is inside or outside the lowpoly mesh...

Can you describe an instance (or even better, send me a file!) where Max7's normal mapper would not create a usable normal-map?

Thanks,

MoP