It looks to me like a lot of that seam is in the diffuse map. I think if you work that out first, the normal seams will be less noticeable. It also seems like youre doing an in-viewport shader. I think those tend to show the seams more easily.
as for the seams, I think I'm one of the lucky ones that's never had any problems (except with max7... ick). I just rip with max8, updated service pack, and always make sure you never break your low poly up if you're ripping areas seperately -- just break up the high poly, not the low... never have seam problems with that.
Ah yes, breaking up the lowpoly when it's meant to be a single seamless mesh will cause those seams.
Normal maps are rendered based off the low-poly normals - as soon as you break polys you will change the normal angle at the break, so when you stitch them back together the normal maps will be trying to calculate lighting based on different low-poly normals, hence the obvious seam.
For single organic meshes, you need to keep the lowpoly mesh complete (as JI Styles said) - if there are areas you don't want to render, just add an Unwrap UV modifier and move the unwanted UVs out of the 0-1 range, that way you keep the lowpoly smoothing while being able to selectively render areas.
I only ever render different segments of lowpoly if they're physically separate objects.
Keeping the mesh complete has helped alot. There's still some faint seams but I guess that unavoidable. I'm also using the Kaldera normal material in this pic which helps too.
Unfortunately there is still some weird stuff happening on the inside of his legs and a few other places. I think this might be xNormal's fault though, as tests I've done with Kaldera's normal mapper doesn't create these. Problem is I can't use Kaldera for the final normal map as the highpoly mesh is too big for max to handle.
Try to import the file while in bounding box mode, then set the properties to show as bounding box and you can handle your file in max, i handled 10 million polygons with that once, you can't see it but you can work with it, that's the way i'm creating my normalmaps with cryteks polybump tool.
You can't avoid some seams, only if all faces are perfectly relaxed rotated and scaled to each other on your map but this will end in a total mess and lots of wasted UV space.
as i said, i'm using cryteks polybump tool, I'm not using the cage so i don't care about that
the thing crazy butcher says is one sollution, another is just to use the lowpoly with 40% opacity as a guide in mudbox so i stay in it's volume (I do the lowpoly first and paint directly over it. Who needs a clean basemesh when having millions of polygons?)
so you can be sure, that importing the highres it fits into the lowpoly so you can just hit the render normalmap button and everything is fine.
Replies
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=359082
There are a lot of tips there for avoiding seems.
-Ben
as for the seams, I think I'm one of the lucky ones that's never had any problems (except with max7... ick). I just rip with max8, updated service pack, and always make sure you never break your low poly up if you're ripping areas seperately -- just break up the high poly, not the low... never have seam problems with that.
aesir - There are seams in the diffuse map but the normal map is doing most of the damage.
Ben Cloward - Thanks for the link Ben, lots of good info there.
J.I Styles - Hmm... I've been breaking up the lowpoly when rendering normals. I'll try giving it a go keeping it solid.
Oh btw, you can probably tell but that's your shader I'm using. I'm really liking it.
And hey to a fellow aussie
Normal maps are rendered based off the low-poly normals - as soon as you break polys you will change the normal angle at the break, so when you stitch them back together the normal maps will be trying to calculate lighting based on different low-poly normals, hence the obvious seam.
For single organic meshes, you need to keep the lowpoly mesh complete (as JI Styles said) - if there are areas you don't want to render, just add an Unwrap UV modifier and move the unwanted UVs out of the 0-1 range, that way you keep the lowpoly smoothing while being able to selectively render areas.
I only ever render different segments of lowpoly if they're physically separate objects.
Unfortunately there is still some weird stuff happening on the inside of his legs and a few other places. I think this might be xNormal's fault though, as tests I've done with Kaldera's normal mapper doesn't create these. Problem is I can't use Kaldera for the final normal map as the highpoly mesh is too big for max to handle.
You can't avoid some seams, only if all faces are perfectly relaxed rotated and scaled to each other on your map but this will end in a total mess and lots of wasted UV space.
the thing crazy butcher says is one sollution, another is just to use the lowpoly with 40% opacity as a guide in mudbox so i stay in it's volume (I do the lowpoly first and paint directly over it. Who needs a clean basemesh when having millions of polygons?)
so you can be sure, that importing the highres it fits into the lowpoly so you can just hit the render normalmap button and everything is fine.