unwanted noise in normal maps

theStoff

I am currently working on a game project and am trying to import the main character. I am having trouble with normal maps. In Maya it looks fine but in the cryengine it seams to have a bunch of extra creases and lines. I am not sure what the problem is. I've read that when baking normals in Maya you may need to invert the green channel but that didn't fix the problem. On a side note I am finding that the eyelashes are getting occluded in the cryengine when they weren't in Maya. Does anyone know why this would be happening?

Maya Render:


Cryengine Screen Captures:

Rob_Blight

If the green channel flip doesn't fix it then it's most likely due to baking. I would recommend using xnormal.

Are you exporting the model with quads? If you want to ensure it displays properly in-game you'll want to triangulate the model before baking and use the same triangulated model in cryengine.

Also make sure you retain the surface normals on export, otherwise they will be recalculated by the (external) baker or game engine.

Check out the polycount wiki as well for loads of info on baking normal maps: http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29

divi

the creases look a bit like dxt compression errors. not much you can do about them aside from using higher texture res. as for the clipping you should re-check that the eyelash geo is actually on top of the face geo and not intersecting. dosn't look that much as if it's a sorting issue.

MM

that is vertex position precision. it has nothing to do with textures or normal maps.

cryengine optimized vertex position so if you have a object with small details that are further away from 0.0.0 origin then those vertex position are optimized.

only way to minimize this is to separate the head and export it as its own object with origin closure to the neck so the eyelid vertices are closer to object origin and more precise. then just place the head manually on the body inside cry.

there is some information about that here in 6.4:

http://playuptools.blogspot.com/2011/08/part-vi-asset-creation-guidelines.html

theStoff

I haven't checked here in a while but thank you very much MM I'll look into it.