Problem with Normal Bake

Visceral

Hi there Polycounters. This will be my first thread at this forum.

Anyhow lets get right into it. Im doing a small UDK scene for the purpuses of practice texture making and fancy normnal map sculpting. To my help i have Mudbox 2011.

However im getting really strange errors i cant seem to find any help for so i assumed this would be the place to go.

So this is my lowpolymodel.


Here is the low poly UV's with it i export into Mudbox 2011.


This is the result of the sculpt, just some worn edges to give it a moore stone look, yes its not perfect but its for learning.


And after i run a normal map extract operation from within Mudbox i get this horrible abomination.


And trust me it looks even worse in UDK.


Can someone tell me what i have done wrong here? I dont have that much experience with sculpting normal maps.

Joshua Stubbles

in that shot, it doesn't look like it's rendering correctly at all. Like the green channel needs to be inverted, or the renderer itself is doing something strange. Doesn't look like just the normals are wonky, since the worn edge going top to bottom also doesn't look right.

What app did you model in? If it's max, have you tried resetting xform and collapsing back to epoly?

teaandcigarettes

So you're baking in Mudbox right? As far as I'm aware, Mudbox doesn't support smoothing groups; edges have to be split manually if you want them to be hard. Try to bake the same mesh in Xnormal or Max and see if it looks any better (you will need to import a cage in XNormal, otherwise you will get nasty seams).

Visceral

Hurrm ok ill try out Xnormal, never used it before but sometime has the be the first right.

haiddasalami

teaandcigarettes wrote: »

So you're baking in Mudbox right? As far as I'm aware, Mudbox doesn't support smoothing groups; edges have to be split manually if you want them to be hard. Try to bake the same mesh in Xnormal or Max and see if it looks any better (you will need to import a cage in XNormal, otherwise you will get nasty seams).

at some time I need to head over to the wiki and look into 3ds max smoothing groups. Always confused by them since in Maya we just have soften edge and harden edge.

Visceral

God bless xNormal!