Normal seams only visable from certain distance and angles?
polycounter lvl 14
Well this is a new one, for me at least. The seams aren't visible from all angles or all distances. In fact, the closer the camera, the better it gets to the point of not even being able to tell. Is this a rendering issue or a serious normal map issue? I'm using four 4096 textures (diffuse, normal, spec) for head, arms, chest, legs. Attached you'll find example images and images of the head and chest normals.
The normals were exported from zBrush and are being used in tangent space. If I were to take an educated guess, are there then two normals along that seam? One for both uv shells? I think that may be the case after reading the wiki on normals some more. I can imagine that the seam is only visible when neither of the normals are shooting light into the camera when it's at certain angles.
There's a small tutorial in the wiki on offsetting the seam to a place that is a perpendicular on the mesh to hid the seam, but I don't see how that could work on this model seeing as it's not a flat surface.
At least using multiple shells fixed the crappy texture resolution I had when I was using one big one. I've just never worked with multiple UV shell like this
The normals were exported from zBrush and are being used in tangent space. If I were to take an educated guess, are there then two normals along that seam? One for both uv shells? I think that may be the case after reading the wiki on normals some more. I can imagine that the seam is only visible when neither of the normals are shooting light into the camera when it's at certain angles.
There's a small tutorial in the wiki on offsetting the seam to a place that is a perpendicular on the mesh to hid the seam, but I don't see how that could work on this model seeing as it's not a flat surface.
At least using multiple shells fixed the crappy texture resolution I had when I was using one big one. I've just never worked with multiple UV shell like this
Replies
It's called dilate, use that to 'pad' your bakes.
Or set it directly from ZB.
It looks like the black background from your diffuse is bleeding through.
Even with enough padding it's always a bad idea to have a black background when your predominant colour isn't black.
Right, a neutral BG color is best, something that is roughly an average of the most prominent colors in your texture.