Feel like an ass for even posting this, I should be past normal map problems by now. Anyway this is pissing me off, and would like some help. Here's the messed up normal maps im getting. The colors look way off than what they should be, except on the very bottom of the one xnormal spat out.



and now Max


here are the meshes


Thanks for the help, homies.

What do you mean "the colours look wrong" ?
The important thing is what that normal-map looks like when applied to the lowpoly ... and you didn't show any screenshots of that.

max one works from some angles, but still not working quite right. and the one baked from xnormal one is just jacked up

Mop- i think the colors are off, because I have never seen as much blue in a normal map, as that Max one. those are parts that are flat, and should not be as blue as they are. You even posted in one of my other threads awhile back;

What's up with the far right image for the lamp textures? The background makes it look like it's meant to be the normal-map, but the colours are all wrong on the textured parts, that isn't a normal-map at all.

and it is looking the same as this one, that you were talking about

Heheh, you got me ;)

The XNormal bake looks like the green channel is inverted. Which is why it looks very wrong in Max.
You'll notice that on your max bake, "downward facing" normals like the bottom of the planks are very green, while on the xnormal bake, it's the "upward facing" normals that look more green.
Try flipping the Green axis (Y- instead of Y+ probably) in XNormal and bake again. It will probably end up looking more like the Max bake.

How do you flip that in XNormal? the Y- Y+ thing? can't find that in xNormal

MoP you are right about the green channel business. In the XNormal model viewer, if I change from Y+ to Y- then the XNormal rendered map looks like it does in Max. So, maybe some setting I have in Max is rendering everything in Y-? Confused.

Boom! I just inverted the green channel of the xNormal map in Photoshop via the Channel tab in the Layers window, and it looks great in Max now. Thanks for the help Mop-a-sauras!!!!

Sleep time now! Yay! DRINK IN IT'S GLORY!!!!!!!

To flip it automatically in XNormal, click the "..." button to the right of the "Normal Map" drop down menu (it's visible in your XNormal screenshot in the first post).
Then you should get drop-downs for each colour channel and the axis it corresponds to.

you can also just invert the green channel in photoshop.

Well yeah, he said he already did that.
However it's always best to fix the "root" of the problem rather than give yourself extra work.

Really nobody should ever have to invert any channels in Photoshop, ever. If you're doing that, then your baking setup is wrong. Every major app that I'm aware of has options to change the output method.

noob ;)

Fine, I should have read all of it. . . blah.

My point wasn't that you shouldn't do it right from the beginning, but sometimes i have to fix normal issues on something someone else baked a long time ago, and it's far easier/faster to just flip a channel than it is to re-bake it.