Normal map tanget help
polycounter lvl 11
Hey Polycount,
I have been working on a gun for my portfolio and it was going well until the normal map.
I exported it out of max with .obj files and rendered out the maps in Xnormal with a cage. When viewed in the Xnormal 3D viewer it looks good(besides some small stuff that is my fault).
Now I take it over to marmoset toolbag, and it has errors everywhere. Thats strange because I have never had this problem before and thought Xnormal and marmoset were synced.
(spec pushed to emphasize the problem)
I started to go ahead and change up the smoothing groups and rebake, but I don't see how it would work without getting seams either by the normals or diffuse.
So what would the best course of action be to fix this? Would adding support geo be appropriate in this situation? That just seems like a sloppy way to fix it I think?
and for reference here is the low with wires and not:
Thanks,
Mike
I have been working on a gun for my portfolio and it was going well until the normal map.
I exported it out of max with .obj files and rendered out the maps in Xnormal with a cage. When viewed in the Xnormal 3D viewer it looks good(besides some small stuff that is my fault).
Now I take it over to marmoset toolbag, and it has errors everywhere. Thats strange because I have never had this problem before and thought Xnormal and marmoset were synced.
(spec pushed to emphasize the problem)
I started to go ahead and change up the smoothing groups and rebake, but I don't see how it would work without getting seams either by the normals or diffuse.
So what would the best course of action be to fix this? Would adding support geo be appropriate in this situation? That just seems like a sloppy way to fix it I think?
and for reference here is the low with wires and not:
Thanks,
Mike
Replies
also use xnormals SBM format and check off export tangents and bi-normals if you want a accurate preview in the max viewport.
I tried flipping the green and baking with Y- and both times it seems to be worse
Ill give the sbm exporter a try and see what happens.
So try and see what formats it imports, I think as Swing said, FBX should be the key.
*edit
Here is the low and normal if it helps
2010 max file
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3171544/tavor/tavor.max
2012 max file
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3171544/tavor/tavor_2012.max
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3171544/tavor/tavor_normals.TGA
In other words when you have irregular quads like you do here then the interpolated basis is heavily affected
by whether the quad is split along one diagonal or the other. I am sure you are familiar with how the same thing visually affects, for instance, Gouraud shading. So if the baker picks one diagonal and the program used to render it (in this case marmoset) splits along the other diagonal then you'd get X-shapes a lot like what you see.
xNormal by default always splits along the shortest diagonal since this is order-independent and gives the better looking topology (avoids thin triangles).
A fool-proof way of testing if this is your issue is to pretriangulate your mesh before export. This way you force both xNormal and marmoset to work on the same triangle-mesh.
That worked perfectly!
Just had to reset my xform and triangulate, works perfect.
Thanks so much for the help, I learned a lot from this.
-Mike