Well my studio max won't allow me to render out normals properly. For some reason I can only use my blue channel. So I decided to use zbrush for my normal mapping. This allows me to use my red and green channels but there is a problem. When the texture is bumped out there are all these triangles making up the normal map so I get this very broken up piece of crap. I was wondering if anyone came across the same issue and had any idea what settings I may be missing that generally fix this issue?

Here are the files

Are you using ZMapper?

If not, get it here: http://206.145.80.239/zbc/showthread.php?t=031281
(you'll need to register and login to download the things, I think, but it's well worth it).

The manual document available there contains step-by-step tutorials for using it too. I've had no such problems when using ZMapper, so if you are already using it i dunno what it could be.

I ran into that very problem jec with a test mesh, the problem I believe was caused by not reseting xforms before exporting to obj, or at least that was what fixed it for me

edit: after looking again at your maps Im not sure it was the exact same problem. the problem I ran into seemed to result in every quad being split into tris, and one tri from each quad was mapped. then the other tri recieved the same texture space as the first. It looked very similar

I downloaded zmapper. I will try it later. Thanks guys.

I've had the exact same thing happen if I mirror an object... the original stays normal, but the mirror has the mapping problems you describe, rooster. In MAX it looks fine, but when exported... ugh...

Be sure to use 12 digits on the OBJ exportation, and Relative vertex numbers OFF.

Good luck