Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I've searched all over the place for a solution to this to no avail. Hopefully someone can help.

I've never worked with normal maps before so I decided to give it a shot. Looked up the process of making them in 3DS Max and everything and followed every direction I've seen to try and get it to work. Unfortunately, I seem to be doing something wrong because it never works.

Basically as an example of the problem I'm having, I made a simple cube. I unwrapped it and made sure none of the faces were touching on the UV map, and I assigned all the faces to a single smoothing group as I've seen suggested.





Then I made an identical cube and did a simple bevel on one of the faces. Presumably this bevel would properly show up on the normal map (as far as I'm aware).





Once I've got my two cubes done, I create the projection on the first non-beveled cube (labelled as box02, just to be clear) and make sure the cage properly surrounds both cubes as well as adding the beveled cube as a reference for it. Set up the render to texture to properly render the normal map (as far as I can tell), and let it do its thing.





Once it's done rendering, I get my normal map. Looks pretty good to me, not really sure if there's anything particularly wrong with it.





I take my normal map and set it as the bump map on my cube's material. Here's where it gets wonky. I've seen others with their normal map being fully rendered in their viewport (not sure how), mine simply looks like the normal map has been applied as a texture (even though it's specified in the bump map).





When I finally get to rendering my cube, the normal map simply doesn't work. I can see where the beveled face should be, but it's completely flat. No raised surface whatsoever.





Now it may just be my lack of experience and severe lack of sleep having been up all night, but I honestly can't tell what's wrong. The strange thing is that even when bringing the normal map into a game engine like TF2, it still doesn't work. So presumably it's something wrong with the actual creation of the normal map and not simply the renderer in Max. Quite frustrating, to say the least. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong and how I can fix it?

A normal map doesn´t change the shape at all, if there is a light source it seems as if from certain angles...

Originally Posted by SpeCter

A normal map doesn´t change the shape at all, if there is a light source it seems as if from certain angles...

Even with lights it still appears to be flat though. I imported a normal mapped texture into TF2 just to see if it would work and it was still completely flat.

looks like its working to me. If you move the light around in 3ds max does the highlight and shadow change on the beveled surface, if so then its working.
Also i think you're misunderstanding the way a normal map works, it doesn't change the geometry, all it does is give the illusion of extra geometry when interacting with a light source.

There is tons of normal mapping resources in the wiki. http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?...xturing%5Cb%29

The shadows don't change. It pretty much just looks like it's painted on the box like a texture.

I've tried to replicate TF2's normal maps like the Ambassador and whatnot as best I could but I still can't seem to figure out how to get it to work.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole process but I can't really seem to replicate the type of normal maps seen on the wiki or in TF2.

You're supposed to have any 'outside' beveled model, anything which is 'outside' the silhouette and is changing it be modeled, especially on that Box, a bevel like that wont' show too well on a Normal Map. It's simply too strong, something less and subtle will show up better in information baking.

On the other hand, anything 'inside' modeled is perfectly fine on any scale. Anything which is 'pushed in' and cannot be read from the silhouette since it's not trying to put fake information, and baked to a normal map will show correctly, but again, it needs to Beveled to be read correctly.

An example of what I mean:


Everything that has a certain amount outside modeling is modeled, and anything that doesn't need to pop out as much, like say the gas cylinders on the chest (like the pads having those small grooves) are fined to be baked since the information transfer is more logical.

If you wanted that thing to POP out more, in the outside bevel on the pads, you'll need to create a Relief/Parallax Map shader, however, it's too expensive and the performance hit is not worth it since you're simply getting a mesh to show up something which would be cheaper to model. Plus, I don't think Source would support it for TF2 naturally.

All in all, you simply needs to know when to bake. Anything which (in my case) is maybe 1CM outside the model, could be baked, anything which requires a little more and is a clearly breaking of the silhouette on a bigger scale (like your box) would require and is much better off modeled.

Some people will say otherwise, but the idea is simply how big that item is going to be and how close the player is going to get to it.

Alright, I sort of get the concept a little better now. I've seen some really crazy stuff done with normal maps so I assumed they had a lot of flexibility to do the kind of stuff I wanted to do, but I didn't really understand the actual mechanics behind it.

Unfortunately I'm still quite a novice when it comes to modelling and I haven't even begun to delve into high-poly sculpting so I suppose engravings and whatnot are a bit out of my league at the moment. Ah well, it was worth a shot.

Maybe you can get a better understanding of what the normal map is doing for you if you applied a real time shader with the normal map, so you don't have to render to see the result.

Use a directX material, and apply a shader that uses normal maps. I like xoliul's shader: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62006


Also, your bake is a little jacked. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but if your going to have a hard edge on your model (like the edges of a cube for example), I don't think you want soft edges there. The variation in color on your boxes shouldn't be there. It should be solid blue.

If this extrusion is a large shape for the model, and should add to the silhouette of the model...just model it. Normal maps ore better suited to smaller details.

Nope, when you bake an object, it's supposed to be all one smoothing group, which will produce a lot of gradients. But this is different for everything, for example, if you were baking a normal for udk, the smoothing groups should correspond to the uv islands.

@ Nzdjh: No problem mate, take it easy. Just rule of thumb, if it's breaking the outline of the model, model it, if it's inside, normal it.

Also, I never modeled for TF2, so I don't know anything about this, but a new school of thought is that modeling stuff is simply 'cheaper' then having a large normal map which has extremely tiny details on which you need large maps sized to get a clean bake. Plus, materials add alot of weight to a model ingame, (in reference to UDK) so there is that to remember.

Ask as much as you like on PC, we're here to help after all.

@gsokol: Depends, most people will bevel/chamfer the model to avoid such issues. Generally, a single smoothing group bake is all you need, as 16bit said, in other cases, you need to break them based upon UV islands.

This all depends on the application you're using, in Max, I generally had an easy time with single smooth bakes.