Apparently x normal is better. From what have tested, it is. It makes more clear normal maps. When I did it in zbrush they were all kinda faded and not sharp.

Won't object space cause problmes if the object moves?
How would I have incorrectly set my uvw space up? I unwrapped it, then I made the normal map on to the unwrapped object. It should line up almost perfectly.
oh... or did you mean in the material editor. I made sure to plug a "normal bump" box into the bump map, and then plug my normal map.tif into the "normal" box in the "normal bump".

You may have set it correct, also try channel directions as a last advice.

Other than that, i dont have any ideas about what could be the problem.

Originally Posted by Alidium

Apparently x normal is better. From what have tested, it is. It makes more clear normal maps. When I did it in zbrush they were all kinda faded and not sharp.

Won't object space cause problmes if the object moves?
How would I have incorrectly set my uvw space up? I unwrapped it, then I made the normal map on to the unwrapped object. It should line up almost perfectly.
oh... or did you mean in the material editor. I made sure to plug a "normal bump" box into the bump map, and then plug my normal map.tif into the "normal" box in the "normal bump".

i opened your file--your red and green channels are swapped, and both red green are flipped. in the "normal bump" slot check off all the "channel direction" checkboxes and render, it should look fine. you should change your swizzle settings in your baker from now on so you don't need to do this, though.

jeez, people around here really over-complicate their solutions.

regarding what makes the best looking normal maps; really you should be baking with whatever has math that matches your renderer the closest. for example, max in max, maya in maya etc. check this out if you want to know more: http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap#Tangent_Basis

also don't use TIF files for your maps, use TGA like everyone else.

You also have a bad normal bake because you've baked your meshes in different positions. The highpoly is about 9 units off in the Y direction so your map looks nothing like the actual highpoly:




Next time you're making your highpoly make sure that you don't use the move tool to move it around - just rotate and pan the camera around it.

Grab a good realtime shader and use it, if you don't know how to do it then watch this.

hello, im new here in this forum. But if u search a lil bit you will find a great discussion started by a guy that worked at brink. He showed the way to bake perfect normal maps. Its not only about the program you will use there is a whole method that start at the way you will design the high poly model. i will search here and see if i can find it.

here is the link, it does not cover seams, sorry it was my mistake. try using xnormals, fix your tangents. Fixing normalmaps at photoshop is the last thing u should do.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showt...ighlight=brink

Attempted flipping green and red and switching them around and rerenderd the normal map with the highpoly in the right location. Ended with the same result.

If i understand this correctly (and i probably dont) from the link racer posted

When you look at a tangent-space normal map for a character, you typically see different colors along the UV seams. This is because the UV shells are often oriented at different angles on the mesh, a necessary evil when translating the 3D mesh into 2D textures. The body might be mapped with a vertical shell, and the arm mapped with a horizontal one. This requires the normals in the normal map to be twisted for the different orientations of those UV shells. The UVs are twisted, so the normals must be twisted in order to compensate. The tangent basis helps reorient (twist) the lighting as it comes into the surface's local space, so the lighting will then look uniform across the normal mapped mesh.

Then this should "fix" itself when in a normal map because the way it works with UVs or something?

Also went and got that shader, installed it and applied it to my object and got this, crashing max soon after.

While I was installing it i got some error about drivers, but then it said it installed successfully.

I would update my drivers except that will cause my computer to be unable to run more than 10 minuets at a time, but that is another story.

Kurt, Do the normals have viable seams when you apply them as a diffuse map? it looks like you got rid of them just by using the shader, but i cant do that right now.

Originally Posted by Alidium

Kurt, Do the normals have viable seams when you apply them as a diffuse map? it looks like you got rid of them just by using the shader, but i cant do that right now.

this doesn't matter. normal maps are a purely mathematical calculation, and what might look funny on the maps may look perfectly fine when displayed on the model.

here's your existing mesh and flipped/swapped bake displaying with no seam in both max scanline and standard DX viewport. keep in mind it looks fairly messed because when you baked it, the mesh was offset a bit as mentioned earlier.



gamma/LUT correction was on inside the file, so i turned that off. i moved your high poly over then i just created a routine baking setup in max using your meshes, and everything went smoothly. here's my file, you can just plug in the map and have a look, or select the low poly, unhide all, and bake a new normal map.

feel free to export to xnormal if you want as well. MAKE SURE you export the projection cage as well to make sure it uses an averaged cage, not split.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1725586/crits/goo1.rar

So I turned off lut/gama again, exported the low poly with the projection cage and recenterd the high poly again. Rendered it in xNormal and put the normal map back on in Max.
And...

No seams!
But not so fast!
When I attempt to use Max to make a normal map in the render to texture i get this abomination.


I'm going to mess around in the render to texture in Max a bit more. I know that have had it work before. Although insight you may have on why that happened would be nice.

When I rendered the normal map in the Max file you gave me racer it worked great. Just stuck it on the object and it worked. Also how did you get the normal maps to appear in the view port?

So I think the main part of the problem was the lut/gama. Turning that back on brings back those seams. But back when I was working on the pants I had the lut/gama off at one point and there was a slight seam there.

So progress yay!

I suggest studying normalmapping from scratch.
The last one seems like a cage/raycasting problem to me.
otherwise you have some overlapping uvws.