The end of xNormal? (nope)
polycounter lvl 13
Update from jogshy 4/4/16:
jogshy said:
xn 3.20.0 is coming soon ( waiting for Max/Maya 2017 ).
I'm concentrating in xn4, some friends are taking care of the xn3's releases. We're migrating the infrastructure and that's why I was silent and some links/emails are broken. We'll fix that the next week!
xn4 was delayed due to Vulkan, Metal, OpenCL-SPIR, etc... the drivers are a big LOL atm
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If he can come up with something that presents a viable competitor to programs currently on the market, xNormal will be relevant again. Otherwise, I'd switch to something that works better and bakes faster.
I mostly wanted to start this thread to find out if they are done or not, and if so recognize their 10+ year effort. Constant free support for multiple communities, raising the quality of game industry art, and improving pipelines significantly. It's no small amount of work.
Yeah in no way did I mean that what they have done up until now haven't been awsome, helped me and most of us I guess for years now and they deserve all the praise they can get. Was hoping they could use all their knowledge they gained from creating xnormal to create something new that they could actually get some money for, instead of all the new players eating up the money we are willing to spend on such an application.
Subst: 150 USD
xNormal: free
I´ll stick to xNormal
And even if the development of Xnormal was to stop altogether leaving us with the app in its current state, it would remain a rock solid, very fast, free, and extremely stable solution. Who cares about the release date as long as it works. Also the fact that Marmoset can be 100% synced with it is pretty damn important.
What is substance synced with ? Do we even know ?
- it does not seem to write the baked maps to disk directly? you have to wait for all the bakes to finish then export manually?
- i have no proper progress update or estimate of time remaining. when done with a map type it just jumps to the next percentage. so 0 % for the entirety of the normal map bake, then 20 % for AO, etc. console/log also gives no clues.
- trouble aborting the bake when i got impatient. it just kept on trucking. had to kill it with fire
- CPU load is never going over 90 % here, averaging more like 80 % (i7 4 cores / 4 ghz, win7, painter 1.7)
- is normal map tangent space locked to mikkt-only? i don't see options to flip around channels just choose between DX and OGL and xnormal allows custom tangent space plugins
- baking resolution maxes out at 4k. xnormal does 32k. not a feature i use every day but just sayin'
- any way to bake zbrush's polypaint stored in the high poly in painter?
- how do you visualize the baking scene? xnormal has a viewer where you can check the models used in the process and spot common issues
well. i must be missing something.
as for xnormal i just wish they came out with a nice standard interface you can rescale and stuff. their current one looks like kai's power tool's bastard child, sorry to say. indispensable application though. added ability to feed it bake configuration settings would make it even more so and pipeline friendly.
I love Mental Ray AO.
Object Space bakes with Handplane.
I bake an id map with vertex color selected. The match by mesh name is fantastic, basically means the end of exploding meshes. Xnormal being free is great but I've pretty much replaced it with Painter, I also have a designer license but I haven't messed with it much, I think that can automate a lot of baking better than painter, I know there's some batch tools for it.
They had said last year, that they were working on xN 4.0, and they sounded very excited about it all.
Stretches back at least three years it seems.
besides all the features it has, most if not all of my recent works required 4k textures so i bake 8k maps and downscale them to get the cleanest result possible.
Next I name all my lowpoly the same with _low and export them all as a single fbx.
In Painter under the common settings in bake you select "by mesh name" under match.
And there you have it, no exploding and no cage, you can import a cage if you want but I haven't really needed it. It also helps enforce good naming conventions on your work. It got a little crazy when I had to name 200 parts on a pretty complex robot but it gave me a one click bake option for all the maps it had: two 4k textures sets for the body and a 2k texture for the cockpit.
Okay, gotta check that out : O
Thnak you, Justin
MM: wouldn't 4x4 or 8x8 supersampling achieve the same results?
By far, Substance Designer is my favorite baking program. The match by name baking feature removes a lot of the headaches that come with exploding the model and makes iteration much quicker.
Not only do I not need to explode models and more, I also no longer need a cage. Let's say I need to change the low poly or UVs for some reason. All I need to do is edit the model, ensure my names still match up, re-export, refresh the map, and it's all perfectly rebaked. Furthermore, if I need to pass of my bakes to someone, I just need to send the Maya file and the Substance file and they can pretty much 1 click re-bake any of my maps if they need to.
Even so Xnormal is still a solid go to solution and does an top job, and still free!
bag_high
bag_low
What happens if you have more than 1-infinity number of high poly meshes that you would like to be baked to that single low poly mesh? For example buttons on the bag/floaters. Should the buttons just be renamed to bag01,bag02_high? If it can only be one high poly object per one low poly that makes it quite limited.
From their documentation, your buttons would be "bag_high_button01, bag_high_button02...." and that would all get baked to bag_low.
Probably will never go back.
I loved Xnormal but would sometimes just have ''gremlins'' bugs that made no sens and had no idea why they would happen and no idea how to fix them.
No problem since I switched to knald
Hope he's just busy working, and forgetting to post online.
It's been a while though...
I'm concentrating in xn4, some friends are taking care of the xn3's releases. We're migrating the infrastructure and that's why I was silent and some links/emails are broken. We'll fix that the next week!
xn4 was delayed due to Vulkan, Metal, OpenCL-SPIR, etc... the drivers are a big LOL atm
Updating first post with this info.
So if we take your bag as an example. The highpoly might be bag_high , bag_high_buttons, bag_high_stitching, bag_high_zipper, bag_high_whatever.. and the low poly would be bag_low
Hope Xnormal 4 is coming somewhere this year. What a great time for 3d software, so many choices!
What's the advantage of an Object Space Normal and then converting with Handplane?
Most (all?) bakers can use an averaged projection mesh/cage so that's not really a major benefit to passing OS through handplane.