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Knald - Master Thread

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  • Sam Hatami
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    Sam Hatami polycounter lvl 16
    Hey Andy, I've been getting this issue. I'm on 340.52. Didn't have this issue before. Don't know if it could be a compatibility error? Do you have any idea whats going on here?

    It happens with any normal (all that worked "before"...just don't know before what :P )

    KnaldNotWorking.png
  • WarrenM
    We had that at work as well. You have to roll back your video driver to an older version. It kind of sucks...
  • Sam Hatami
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    Sam Hatami polycounter lvl 16
    Thanks Warren, works fine now, rolled back further to 337.
  • almighty_gir
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    almighty_gir ngon master
    Some Toolbag2 users are having similar issues with new drivers: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144402

    It appears that the same thing is affecting normals in Toolbag2 with nVidia drivers later than 344.11, it would be interesting to see if the same is true with Knald.
  • Jeff
    Yes it's also totally broken for Knald since nVidia 344.11 drivers version.
    Exactly same checker pattern issue when integrating norm/derivative map.
    We are recommending that people use the 340.52 drivers (or any recent driver before 344.11) until further notice.

    Sadly this is completely out of our hands, but we will let everyone know once we get an update from NVIDIA. We hope they will have the issue resolved soon.
  • j3st3r
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    j3st3r polycounter lvl 9
    For me the 340.52 is broken too...reverting to 337 and see what happens
  • j3st3r
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    j3st3r polycounter lvl 9
  • ZippZopp
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    ZippZopp polycounter lvl 12
    any updates on this situation? I have multiple pieces of software at work that seem to require different driver versions in order to function properly
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    Hey guys,

    Sorry for the late reply! I haven't been getting notifications for this thread for some reason.

    NVIDIA have released a new beta driver this morning which should fix the various issues that people have been having regarding the crashes and corrupted normal maps. Please download the latest driver (347.09) and let us know if everything is working as expected. If not please post your GPU version and the issue you are having.

    I want to stress that is very important that everyone who was getting these issues must perform a clean install of the driver when upgrading followed by a reboot of the system. We have had some reports that not performing a clean install is causing the corrupted normals issue to remain.

    Please let me know how you get on.

    Cheers!
  • gnoop
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    gnoop polycounter
    I have just tried Knald and while it looks very quick for doing some basic stuff I don't feel a lot of incentives for buying. It makes nothing unique.

    Once it would has a bit more sophisticated procedural ambient occlusion effects, maybe not only gpu based. Something like Richdirt plugin for 3d max for example ( it's possible to do similar things even withoit that plugin in 3d max), or just something more controllable than a simple SSAO, something with vector directional settings, noise inputs etc for creating masks for textures and at the same time working more or less interactively, it would be a soft of a dream and absolutely must have
  • Jeff
    Hello Andy,


    Great, thank you for noticing.
    So glad I can keep better FPS within BF4 AND run Knald on same driver's build now.
    Would it be from a color map, or from a norm/derivative one, everything's working fine on my side :)


    And yes, gnoop, 100% agreed : Considering the current market's alternatives, Knald could become more "justified" in some ways.
    True we all want tools integrating as much of the neat/mandatory ideas all around for a given price.
    So I would also highlight some others :
    - Lighting : HDR library added to presets
    - PBR viewport shader models (both spec/metalness models) >> Marmoset/Substance Designer/painter-way
    - profile SLOPE per frequency slot, for normal generation from diffuse, influencing all outputs >> nDo/dDo
    - 'ALBEDOification' of the diffuse >> B2M ... even photoshop's shadow/highlight adjustment allows it
    - SPEC/GLOSS/ROUGH intensity sliders + option-map (gradients/levels over color map) >> Substance Designer/B2M/crazybump
    (most are quick cases I guess)

    But whatever possible, gnoop is right, you should probably think about adding some tabs & options here and there in order to keep such indie/pro retail prices ?
  • TommyTehZombie
    After doing a clean install of 347.09, Knald is working after loading normal maps.
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    Oh sweet I'm excited to test out the new Nvidia drivers with Knald! It was unusable for a bit.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Okay I'm getting this issue with the latest nvidia driver, what exactly is a clean install. I removed the driver and geforce experience, rebooted, then installed the latest driver past 347.25
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    malcolm wrote: »
    Okay I'm getting this issue with the latest nvidia driver, what exactly is a clean install. I removed the driver and geforce experience, rebooted, then installed the latest driver past 347.25

    Hi malcolm,

    A clean installation of the driver is where you totally remove all remnants of the previous driver (such as cached files etc.) before installing the new driver.

    There is a good guide that you can follow here
    http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/327414-nvidia-drivers-avoid-problems.html

    Once you have installed the driver you can make sure that there are no shader files still cached by performing the following steps

    1. Go to your NVIDIA control panel> Manage 3D Settings, turn off Shader Cache and hit Apply
    2. Reboot your PC
    3. Go to %username%\AppData\Local\Temp\NVIDIA Corporation\NV_Cache and delete the contents of the folder (You can paste that address directly into a Windows address bar)
    4. Go back to your NVIDIA control panel> Manage 3D Settings, turn On Shader Cache and hit Apply
    5. Try Knald.
    If these steps don't work please send me a PM with your system specs and I will investigate further.


    Cheers!
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Nevermind, figured it out. Knald is working with the latest video driver.

    Download the latest driver from nVidia website. Install it even if you have the latest driver already installed, when you are prompted, don't choose express installation, instead choose "clean installation." Reboot when the install is complete and it should now work.
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    Awesome! Glad to hear everything is working as expected :)
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    Hmmmmmmmmm.

    Are you all releasing a convection oven?
  • odd_enough
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    odd_enough polycounter lvl 9
  • Teessider
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    Teessider polycounter lvl 11
    Andy you tease :P
  • Shiv
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    Shiv polycounter lvl 15
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    baked bacon..`?
  • MrHobo
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    MrHobo polycounter lvl 13
    We will all need adult diapers for the pants crapping joy this will bring...
  • gloriousczar
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    gloriousczar polycounter lvl 6
    Sweet!! Looking forward to seeing what Knald's baking option are. Also a feature request, would it be possible to add the ability to copy and paste maps in and out of Knald, like crazybump?? :D
  • tynew
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    tynew polycounter lvl 9
    I'm really looking forward to this news!
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    I really need that copy past functionality, don't actually need any baking out of Knald. We've already got that covered in MightyBake.

    metalliandy any updates on all the feature requests that have been suggested in this thread, Knald is still one of our most used programs on the environment art team.
  • ridger_drift
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    ridger_drift polycounter lvl 5
    malcolm wrote: »
    I really need that copy past functionality...

    Why not enable Knald's "Post Export Options" and set it to open in Photoshop?
  • Joopson
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    Joopson quad damage
    malcolm wrote: »
    don't actually need any baking out of Knald. We've already got that covered in MightyBake.

    I, for one, am really excited for baking functionality in Knald.
  • tynew
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    tynew polycounter lvl 9
    Joopson wrote: »
    I, for one, am really excited for baking functionality in Knald.

    Myself included as Mightybake doesn't support Max fully!
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    It's not opening the file in Photoshop that's the issue, its opening the colour map in Knald that takes forever, ctrl + alt + o, then pick all file types because Knald doesn't recognize .psd eventhough it fully supports it, then load your file, then turn off diffuse, then do that all again 5 times at least because I use multilayer exports to get the best looking 2d normal maps from Photo.

    It would be so much better if I could just past the clipboard directly into Knald, or if diffuse off would stay checked, or if .psd was already available by default in the file browser, I can go on and on there's over 1 year's worth of simple usability feature requests in this thread and I think baking high to low is probably the minority. Plus I'm a Maya user so I already get perfect 6 second bakes that work in UE4 without shading errors from MightyBake.
  • ridger_drift
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    ridger_drift polycounter lvl 5
    malcolm wrote: »
    It's not opening the file in Photoshop that's the issue, its opening the colour map in Knald that takes forever...

    Sorry, I misunderstood your original statement. The slow opening time was finally resolved for my 680M with the latest rounds of GeForce updates, but that apparently is not the case for all Nvidia cards it would seem.

    I don't disagree with you on the rest of the usability requests/issues. As for the baking being low priority, that depends. I know from personal experience that Max or xNormal baking usually takes quite some time so having the option to bake out from Knald might be far preferable.

    Nevertheless, Knald should address the issues brought up by yourself and other users first and foremost before moving on towards integrating some type of in-house baking option.
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    Hey guys,

    The copy/paste is already included in our internal builds, along with many of the other requests found in the thread such as the global/group/tab save etc. that is in Lys (that allows pretty much every GUI option to be saved on a global/group/tab basis) and will be available to test during the next public beta, which won't be long.

    The reason we posted about the baking is that we figured that people would get more of a kick from that than they would from a picture with copy/paste or psd import support etc. The teaser was mainly to show that we are actively working on Knald and people could expect something cool from us soon.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Yes! I'm really excited for the copy paste! And the fact you guys are still working on Knald, we still use it every day at work.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Hey metalliandy, just wanted to make something clear about .psd support. Knald supports .psd files by default, but when you go to open a colour map .psd is not filtered in the list by default. You have to choose all file types rather than all image types. Apparently .psd is not considered to be an image. Any ways, I'd like the browse menu to be updated so I don't have to click that button constantly, it slows the whole process down of using Knald for what it's best at, creating photo to normals faster than anything else.
  • Rucy
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    Rucy polycounter lvl 4
    Hey, was wondering if there was a way to bake AO from another object with seperate UV's onto my AO map for my model in knald?
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    malcolm wrote: »
    Hey metalliandy, just wanted to make something clear about .psd support. Knald supports .psd files by default, but when you go to open a colour map .psd is not filtered in the list by default. You have to choose all file types rather than all image types. Apparently .psd is not considered to be an image. Any ways, I'd like the browse menu to be updated so I don't have to click that button constantly, it slows the whole process down of using Knald for what it's best at, creating photo to normals faster than anything else.

    Hey Malcolm,

    Thanks for the clarification :)
    Rucy wrote: »
    Hey, was wondering if there was a way to bake AO from another object with seperate UV's onto my AO map for my model in knald?
    Do you mean you want a secondary mesh to influence the baked AO of the current mesh? Something like a ground plane etc.?

    If so, yes, this is possible.

    Join the 2 meshes together as one object and offset the UVs of the object you want to gain influence from so they are outside 1:1 UV space and that should do what you want. :)
  • Rucy
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    Rucy polycounter lvl 4
    Hi, thanks. Yeah I worked it out. I simply deleted the UV on the secondary model I wanted to influence my AO then merged with my main model. That worked great.:)
  • karera
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    karera polygon
    Hi,

    First of all, thanks for a great product!

    I wrote to support@knaldtech.com in the end of January and still haven't recieved any word on this issue I have. So I'm trying this approach now to see if I can get some help over here.

    I'm a 3D-artist at Poppermost Productions and I'm having some issues with Knald freezing up on me when I load a file to work from. The entire computer goes into full stop and I have to hard-reboot it.

    I have a AMD Radeon R9 200 series graphics card and running Knald on a PC that should fit the system requirements.

    I've tried re-installing both Knald and the latest drivers for my GPU, and yet the same issue.

    It has worked perfectly until this. I'm thinking it might be because of AMD's latest drivers that I installed a short while ago. Have you heard or experienced anything of the sort with these cards? I've also tried rolling back to previous drivers for my GPU but nothing have worked so far.


    Any other ideas on what I could try? Thanks in advance!

    Kind regards,
    Alexander Lilja
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    karera wrote: »
    Hi,

    First of all, thanks for a great product!

    I wrote to support@knaldtech.com in the end of January and still haven't recieved any word on this issue I have. So I'm trying this approach now to see if I can get some help over here.

    I'm a 3D-artist at Poppermost Productions and I'm having some issues with Knald freezing up on me when I load a file to work from. The entire computer goes into full stop and I have to hard-reboot it.

    I have a AMD Radeon R9 200 series graphics card and running Knald on a PC that should fit the system requirements.

    I've tried re-installing both Knald and the latest drivers for my GPU, and yet the same issue.

    It has worked perfectly until this. I'm thinking it might be because of AMD's latest drivers that I installed a short while ago. Have you heard or experienced anything of the sort with these cards? I've also tried rolling back to previous drivers for my GPU but nothing have worked so far.


    Any other ideas on what I could try? Thanks in advance!

    Kind regards,
    Alexander Lilja

    Hi Alexander,

    Sorry about missing your support email. If we don't reply within a day or so it best to send a follow up to the same address to remind us of your issue. :)

    It sounds almost definitely like a local issue to me where something in your system is causing the problem to manifest. It could be a driver issue, depending in which mode the freeze is happening (Loading Normal, Height or Color maps).

    Where does the issue occur? When the open dialogue initially appears or after you select an image to load?
    What image are your trying to load (size, format etc.)?
    Which mode are your trying to load the image in (Normal, Height or Color)?
    Which driver were you using before the issue started happening?
    Which driver is suspected of causing the issue?

    It might be worth trying a clean install of your GPU drivers in order to see if it is a shader cache issue too.
  • karera
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    karera polygon
    Hi Alexander,

    Sorry about missing your support email. If we don't reply within a day or so it best to send a follow up to the same address to remind us of your issue. :)

    It sounds almost definitely like a local issue to me where something in your system is causing the problem to manifest. It could be a driver issue, depending in which mode the freeze is happening (Loading Normal, Height or Color maps).

    Where does the issue occur? When the open dialogue initially appears or after you select an image to load?
    What image are your trying to load (size, format etc.)?
    Which mode are your trying to load the image in (Normal, Height or Color)?
    Which driver were you using before the issue started happening?
    Which driver is suspected of causing the issue?

    It might be worth trying a clean install of your GPU drivers in order to see if it is a shader cache issue too.


    SOO. I was writing this long answer back to this post, and was checking again when the program goes into halt and such. But APPARENTLY. Problem has solved itself automagically. Have not changed anything that I know of since it last occurred. So I dunno. Will get back to you if it reoccurs.

    Here's what I wrote if it might help you in anyway in the future:

    - Where does the issue occur?
    The issue occurs after selecting a texture from the dialogue box in "Load Norm/Deriv".
    I can browse files perfectly fine but after pressing "Open" the computer goes into full stop.
    I've tried various sizes(all power of 2) and textures that has worked perfectly before.

    - What image are your trying to load (size, format etc.)?
    Anything from 1k, 2k, mostly tga but some png or tif.

    - Which mode are your trying to load the image in (Normal, Height or Color)?
    Load Normal/Deriv, Load Color Map, will try the other modes too if it stops again.

    - Which driver were you using before the issue started happening?
    I THINK the AMD driver from 4/25/2014, 14.4.
    http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%208.1%20-%2064&rev=14.4

    - Which driver is suspected of causing the issue?
    The latest one, but I've tried rolling back to previous ones too with no luck.

    But then again. Now it seems to work out of nowwhere with the newest drivers from AMD. (That didn't work before).

    There might have been something else on my computer causing this that has disappeared but I have no clue why. Anyway. Thanks for the quick reply and once again, thank you for a good product!
  • DoX.
    I'm having this issue any time I try to load up my normal map it just gives me grey. Happens every time for every normal I've tried it doesn't matter what file type it is. No matter what it's always grey. Besides that when I load in a height map it works. So lets just say I'm rater confused right now...

    Screenshot_50.png

    UPDATE:

    It also gives me this some times.

    Screenshot_51.png

    Here is a picture of my specs I don't see it being my GPU unless Knald isn't compatible with Windows 8 yet.

    Screenshot_52.png
  • metalliandy
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    metalliandy interpolator
    Hi DoX,

    Thanks for posting!

    Does this happen no matter what size normal map you are loading?
    Was this the first driver that has caused this issue?

    Could you perform a clean installation of the newest driver and clear the shader cache and let me know how you get on please?

    Performing a Clean Installation of the driver

    1. Download the latest NVIDIA and start the install.
    2. When you are prompted choose "clean installation" rather than the default "express installation"
    3. Reboot

    Deleting the Shader Cache
    1. Go to your NVIDIA control panel> Manage 3D Settings, turn off Shader Cache and hit Apply
    2. Reboot your PC
    3. Go to %username%\AppData\Local\Temp\NVIDIA Corporation\NV_Cache and delete the contents of the folder (You can paste that address directly into a Windows address bar)
    4. Go back to your NVIDIA control panel> Manage 3D Settings, turn On Shader Cache and hit Apply
    5. Try Knald.


    If these steps don't work please let me know and I will investigate further.
  • DoX.
    Fixed! Thanks Andy for helping and sending me this link! It worked wonders!

    http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/327414-nvidia-drivers-avoid-problems.html
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Does anyone know, can Knald be used to convert a tangent space normal map into an object space normal map, and then back again?
  • Farfarer
    Not that I know of. xNormal can do that, though.
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Thanks Fararer, yes just tried that out. I should have been more specific too, I don't care about a high to low bake, I just need to convert some photo to normals into object space and then back to tangent space. Would be great if Knald had this ability.

    For those interested I've done this in xNormal by loading up a flat plane as my low poly mesh and converting the existing map in xnormal, then converting it back.
  • tadpole3159
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    tadpole3159 polycounter lvl 12
    DoX. wrote: »
    Screenshot_52.png

    Hold up a second. Is your computer called "poop"
  • malcolm
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    malcolm polycount sponsor
    Feature request, could we get the ability to sharpen the bevel that is created by fine, medium, large, and extra large. It would be great to be able to have a medium bevel and then tighten the edge so you get a thick sharp bevel.
  • Gheromo
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    Gheromo polycounter lvl 11
    Hmm, found a bug. Normal map with alpha channel (TGA) caused my texture to be flipped vertically on import into knald!
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