XNormals not rendering

Doxturtle

When I load all my meshes into XNormals and attempt to bake it shows this screen, however it does not progress or move forward:



I have used XNormals before and had no problems with it however for some reason it has now stopped working. 

These are the settings I have used:





Bake options:



This is not dependent on the map type either, I have tried baking various types of map. 

Any ideas on how I can fix this? I have tried reinstalling and downloading the newest version, that did not help. 

huffer

Are you using .fbx for your high and low meshes? Try .obj maybe? I remember something similar happening to me

.Wiki

Your lowpoly mesh scale is set to 1 while your highpoly mesh scale is set to 100... 

Doxturtle

.Wiki said:

Your lowpoly mesh scale is set to 1 while your highpoly mesh scale is set to 100... 

I never realized this was something I could change.. oops.

I will see if that fixes the problem XD

Doxturtle

Tried baking with both the meshes set to 1 scale, this didn't work either

huffer said:

Are you using .fbx for your high and low meshes? Try .obj maybe? I remember something similar happening to me

I am using the xnormals exporter

thomasp

i have encountered that issue at times. could not find a solution when it happened. but worth trying: use xnormal's 3D viewer (under tools) to inspect what your baking scene looks like - do the objects look weird or are they not in the correct place?

run your OBJs through some other 3d package to inspect them for anything unusual, export from a different package to see if there's something in the file that confuses xNormal. e.g. zbrush does some OBJs sometimes that can crash other apps right away or have all sorts of funky issues. so i usually pipe them through 3ds max (where they look fine) and export again before loading them into the actual target app if i know i have to work with a problematic combo.

Doxturtle

I exported all the files from 3ds max and opened them in XNormals so there should be no problem with them.

I opened the scene in XNormals and it seemed fine. Both the high poly and the low poly imported properly it seems. They were both aligned and in the correct places. 

CAGE:



NO CAGE:



I will try exporting them as OBJ's instead of using the XNormals exporter and see how it goes

Doxturtle

I tried exporting as OBJS instead of using the SBM exporter, however this did not fix the problem either.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do, or know any other ways I can bake cavity maps?

thomasp

you could upload your files somewhere and provide a link here to see if it happens on other machines, too. the less files required to reproduce the effect, the better. would love to get to the bottom of this myself, rare an occurence as it may be here so far.

Doxturtle

thomasp said:

you could upload your files somewhere and provide a link here to see if it happens on other machines, too. the less files required to reproduce the effect, the better. would love to get to the bottom of this myself, rare an occurence as it may be here so far.

Sorry it took me ages to upload, I was trying to remember what mediafire was called XD 
http://www.mediafire.com/download/6abzr1rdxqq2l9i/drill+-+Copy.zip
this is the scene in max, it still has projection modifiers and stuff

huffer

Everything works fine here, both exporting .fbx and .obj

Doxturtle

huffer said:

Everything works fine here, both exporting .fbx and .obj

You got it to work in XNormals?

Hmm, I guess I must be doing something really wrong XD

Any ideas at all what it could be?

I can load everything fine into XNormals but when I press to generate maps it just says rendering and shows a black screen. 

Doxturtle

When I click generate maps it is definitely doing something:

Doxturtle

Sorry for spamming replies a bit, but I left it for a while whilst doing other stuff and the result was this..



I have baked the scene before in Max so I know there is no problem with any of the meshes.

It took ages to bake aswell, even on a x512 with 1x AA, before it used to be do 2048's at a pretty decent rate

Maybe I need to update some video drivers or something 

Doxturtle

Bumpy bump.

I really need to get this fixed. Any got any ideas how to fix this or what is causing it?

RobeOmega

You could try uninstalling and reinstalling Xnormal to reset your settings just in case you accidently changed a setting that is messing everything up. I have no idea how effective this is but if you are desperate you may want to try it.

Doxturtle

Robeomega said:

You could try uninstalling and reinstalling Xnormal to reset your settings just in case you accidently changed a setting that is messing everything up. I have no idea how effective this is but if you are desperate you may want to try it.

Already tried doing that  

thomasp

on my end where i had it happen as well i can rule out changed settings in xnormal interface as a cause.

doxturtle: would you be able to upload the very files you exported from your max scene and loaded into xnormal? to rule out anything that happens during export and that may lead to the "works on my machine" effect.

Doxturtle

thomasp said:

on my end where i had it happen as well i can rule out changed settings in xnormal interface as a cause.

doxturtle: would you be able to upload the very files you exported from your max scene and loaded into xnormal? to rule out anything that happens during export and that may lead to the "works on my machine" effect.

I have included both the OBJs and the XNormal SBMs
http://www.mediafire.com/download/zrk8gpaxg56fn71/drill_xnormal_bake.zip

thomasp

ok, i just tested these files and both obj and sbm bake quickly or at least with expected speed here for map types: normals, height, base, bent normals, prt-pn, convexity, thickness, proximity, wireframe, direction, vertex colors, curvature, translucency, derivative. nothing unusual to report.

now, AO, cavity and radiosity normals map types seem problematic though at 512 rays for AO and 128 for cavity. the rendering window never shows any progress but i found that the maps indeed finished after unusually long times (210-288 seconds for a 512 map? doesn't seem right) and just showed up when rendering was all done. all of it done on the CPU/default bucket renderer. taskmanager shows very little load on a single core for most of that time then rendering starts and finishes with a quick burst on a 4ghz i7.

can anybody confirm this behaviour?
will have a look at CUDA behaviour tomorrow.

Doxturtle

thomasp said:

ok, i just tested these files and both obj and sbm bake quickly or at least with expected speed here for map types: normals, height, base, bent normals, prt-pn, convexity, thickness, proximity, wireframe, direction, vertex colors, curvature, translucency, derivative. nothing unusual to report.

now, AO, cavity and radiosity normals map types seem problematic though at 512 rays for AO and 128 for cavity. the rendering window never shows any progress but i found that the maps indeed finished after unusually long times (210-288 seconds for a 512 map? doesn't seem right) and just showed up when rendering was all done. all of it done on the CPU/default bucket renderer. taskmanager shows very little load on a single core for most of that time then rendering starts and finishes with a quick burst on a 4ghz i7.

can anybody confirm this behaviour?
will have a look at CUDA behaviour tomorrow.

Thanks for looking into this, when I was doing it I think I was having problems with normal maps aswell as cavity, AO etc.