I thought Maya was pretty good with itself between baker/renderer?

Yes it is, but with very high res meshes, you have to deal with Xnormal at the end. and Xnormal produces better AO andplenty of different useful maps you know

just saw the post on your blog Talon
http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/06...lugin-xnormal/

nice one

To be true if you are using the advantage package of 2012 and 2013 you got Turtle, best/fastest baker of nmaps and AO ever! (believe me, I tried all of 'em)

Great! So glad you stuck with this!

you are my hero of the day!

Hey Talon. Thx so much for the great plugin! I have seen it work for a coworker, but I am still getting the memory error mentioned very early in this thread when using the 32bit version of the newest Xnormal. I am not using Average Normals or FBXs. Both high and low res meshes are objs: high exported from Zbrush, and low exported from Maya. Thanks for any help!

I think this is an issue with the files not having exported normals, which my plugin is trying to access.

I've got a check in for that in my local build of the plugin, but I'll have to do a bit of testing before I release it.

For the time being, if you select Average Normals, does the issue go away?

Also, there's a bit of an issue with the way Unity handles the smoothing angle at the moment.

Here's how to work around it until I get a proper fix in;

Thx for the quick reply. I tested both high and low res meshes with Average Normals, then just the low res mesh with it on. Neither option works unfortunately. The low res mesh obj was exported from Maya with Smoothing and Normals turned on as well. Thx again for any further info!

Hmm... what happens if you try another file format, FBX for example?

Big thanks for creating this wonderful little plugin!!! I made a test example to prove it works. The example is a simple window baked on a very low poly mesh with very soft normals. I made it into two smoothing groups to not stress the normals too much. But I am very happy about the result. Cheers!



/Jenz

Thanks for the idea Talon. Fbx files do seem to work for the low poly with a cage exported from Maya loaded into Xnormal, with one smoothing group on the low poly mesh. If I follow your steps within Unity for the model (setting Tangents to Calculate and the Smoothing Angle to 180), it seems to work overall.

Myself and a coworker also tried the 2 cage types that Xnormal can create, SBM and OVB. Both of these throw the memory read error with the Unity plugin. So I guess it's FBX all the way! Thanks again!

Do you plan making 64 bit version ? I installed x86 version of Xn only for this plugin.

Ehr, I might do. Right now, I don't actually know how.

Making this has been the first time I've ever written C++ or used Visual C++... it's all totally foreign to me. I know next to nothing about proper programming.

I'll see if I can figure it out.

Ohhh... nice results for programming noobie. Thanks anyway. Its a great plugin.

So it turns out I can't make 64bit stuff with the free version of Visual C++. I'll need to source access to the full version and then export there.

I'll keep you posted

Yay cool to hear you wanted to sink your teeth into 64 bit version so soon. Thanks!

I managed to get the 90 day trial version of Visual Studio 2008 and figured out how to build x64 versions of the plugin.

http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/06...lugin-xnormal/

Great news! Thanks man.

Any plans to update for xNormal 3.17.14?

Yeah, made a start on that yesterday but it was throwing some errors at me, I'll need to take a proper look at it.

Sorry this took so long, the Visual Studio project ended up with wrong settings somehow having set it up in 2008 rather than Enterprise but I finally sorted it out (it's all complete jargon to me).

Also discovered the versions I'd released previously were still in unoptimised debug mode, so hopefully this'll be a little faster now, too.

http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/06...lugin-xnormal/

Awesome thanks!

Hey,

This is awesome, thanks for this. =]

I was wondering if the Unity guys ever released their tangent basis that they use or is what you have a super close "guess" that looks ok 99% of the time.

-edit-
Actually... never mind, just checked out your blog post where it says the unity guys released the source code.