Xnormal - AO not matching Normal
polycounter
As you can see here my renderd Ambient Occlusion texture is not entirely matching my normal:
(The AO is just mutltiplied on the normal to show it)
I renderd both textures with the same settings in xnormal. I used a cage for the rendering that i also have edited in max. It seems randomly where the AO is not matching the normal, it looks all very strange to me!
Any suggestions, ideas a greatly appreciated.
(The AO is just mutltiplied on the normal to show it)
I renderd both textures with the same settings in xnormal. I used a cage for the rendering that i also have edited in max. It seems randomly where the AO is not matching the normal, it looks all very strange to me!
Any suggestions, ideas a greatly appreciated.
Replies
render it out with different ray length values if your having issues with capturing the wrong bts of the HP, pain in the ass
I will fix that AO map in PS, have allready fixed my normal in ps and makeing it all over again with even more to fix in the normal sounds horrible to me.
A question... do you computed the AO using the Simple GPU tool... or did you use the software path?
I pretty much changed no settings. I used the 3.15.3.8179 version, probably should have tryed the new version but i guess it wouldnt make a difference in this case?
thx for looking into it
EQ: Great tip! I'm going to try that now. I'm baking AO's with xnormal (just started using it today) What values are you using for your low and high ray distances?
Btw do you find it to be a large time saver over having to use the projection cage modifier in max? I find it sucks a lot of time out of my work flow...then again i'm running a P4
Jogshy: Is there an option in your software that bakes out the alpha channel as well? I use it for
quick selections in PS often (all the time).
As far the min and max distances, it usually good just to do a couple quick low-res test bakes, and see what the lowest value you can do is, and also what the highest value you need is. Now its worth mentioning that you'll have to render your AO TWICE, which can really be a huge waste of time. I tend to keep working while rendering anyway(set xnormal priority to low in task manager) so its not a big deal for me.
But really these days, i do mostly environment type work and props, so i can just explode my meshes and not really have to deal with intersecting problems at all. I go over the exploding proccess here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=53731&page=3 and cover some of the AO baking stuff here: http://wiki.polycount.net/Ambient_Occlusion_Map?highlight=%28ambient%29
jogshy: I'll give it a shot. Xnormal is a great piece of software. Thanks for your feedback and for creating it! Now...I just have to get the hang of the process
Eric: Looks like a great plugin! Thank you, I'll try it out.
Damn this forum is good.
But... if you rendered the AO using the Simple GPU AO tool ( image output, not vcolors ) I bet the misalignment is just because the GPU rasterizes the triangles using a different filling convention than I do... and it's a problem because each graphical API uses a different one ( OpenGL uses one, D3D9 other, D3D10 other, etc...)
If you want just send me your meshes by email. I'll debug the problem more in depth.