handplane is released!
ngon master
Hi everyone,
We just released handplane. There are a lot of updates from the beta and we now have commercial licenses for sale. http://www.handplane3d.com
Additionally, I have started recording training videos related to normal mapping and the first few are available on the website.
The free build is identical to the commercial options. Licensing is $50 per seat for freelancers, $150 per seat for studios.
We just released handplane. There are a lot of updates from the beta and we now have commercial licenses for sale. http://www.handplane3d.com
Additionally, I have started recording training videos related to normal mapping and the first few are available on the website.
The free build is identical to the commercial options. Licensing is $50 per seat for freelancers, $150 per seat for studios.
Replies
For those who do not know what handplane is, its a completely awesome tool that will take an object space baked normal map and convert it to a tangent space map, the kicker is it will do it in a variety of tangent spaces specific to various 3d apps and engines. This is great if you don't have a tools team available to you to fix your pipeline to sync up your tangent space, or if you're working with an engine that you don't have full source code access to.
You can use Handplane to get your models into UDK, Maya, Max, etc, no matter where you've created your model or baked your object space maps, with as accurate as possible result. This means less smoothing errors, hard edges, excessively splitting up uv islands, or as much time spent doing test bakes to fix issues related to smoothing.
Been using this more and more recently and it's lovely. No need to worry about vertex normals or triangulation changing after baking your object space map... just throw it the FBX you exported to the game and give it your object space map, et voil
can't wait to dig into it!
-bake object space normals to lowpoly in Max/Maya/Blender/etc
-convert to tangent space normals in Handplane
-throw in Unity/UDK/etc
right?
For $50, that's not a bad deal for removing a lot of headaches.
basically. There are some limitations in different engines that limit the possible shading quality. Unreal in particular cannot be made perfect. However, handplane offers the best solution of anything else out there and it is the only solution that works with rigged meshes.
EDIT:
Store should be fixed now.
I'll echo the Marmoset question. Any chance of support for Toolbag? and the OsX one too. That would be great.
Marmoset is on the radar.
Anyway, good to see this problem being addressed.
Why, whats the problem? Are they doing something weird with the base level math like UE3 or something along those lines?
Its two things. They didn't want to share the code with us so that we could recreate ce3's behavior, and they are doing something abnormal with certain kinds of meshes that would require different outputs for different types of models in CE3. There is probably a way we can make it work but it would require bringing your models into ce3, then exporting them, then bringing those files into handplane. I would really like to get ce3 support working but handplane is confusing enough to people already.
You guys do realise that CE3 effectively just uses the 3ds Max Tangent Basis right?
When it comes to Crytek, it's like all you're doing is banging your head against a wall.
That isn't actually the case. I hear that a lot and I'm not sure where that idea came from.
Here is a link to some testing we did on ce3 and max tangent basis:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1736754&postcount=178
Keep in mind that there are a lot of smoothing splits and some supporting loops on that model and a lot of those surfaces would look correct with any normal map.
Don´t object space normals require 100% unique UVs? How does it work if you want to create an object that has mirroring or overlapping UVs?
Just make sure you're not rotating the model around after baking the OS map but before converting to TS, as that will give you all sorts of problems (can't really imagine why someone would do that though).
No, Xnormal uses Mikktspace by default if your mesh doesn't contain tangents/bi-normals, and tries to use the tangents/bi-normals if you export using a format like FBX that supports them.
Neither of which are going to match max results 100%, and Cry doesn't match max either, nor does Cry match their own proprietary baking tool, its really a mess.
It renders the object space normals then, using the normals/tangents/binormals it's calculated, converts that object space normal into a tangent space normal.
So there's no real difference to the workflow of baking, essentially you're just using handplane to do that last step - the conversion of object to tangent - but converting it to the tangent space you want rather than that of the 3D app.
in the original luxinia commandline tool doing os to tangent conversion, I had simply checked the average dotproducts of an uvchart (triangle normal vs texture normals). That way even if they overlap in UVs, you actually now which "side" is stored in the texture (as it's unlikely that a UV-chart itself is inconsistent during baking)
Ah nice, thanks. Not much use to us right now, but good to know
Could you describe your workflow so we can try and make handplane fit your needs better?