Source Engine Tangent Basis?
polycounter lvl 17
Anyone know what code it uses to generate it's tangents?
You can't feed explicit tangents in, it does that stuff itself.
If I can find it, I'll throw together an xNormal plugin to bake normal maps synced to Source.
You can't feed explicit tangents in, it does that stuff itself.
If I can find it, I'll throw together an xNormal plugin to bake normal maps synced to Source.
Replies
Unless they have some custom in-house tools/plugin, id say Maya's tangent basis is your best bet.
Most studios/engines do(have a custom tangent basis) whether on purpose or by chance is another story. Most studios in my experience don't even know what "synced" means as far as normals, even Epic until recently didn't have a solution for synced bakes in UE3.
So it would be much, much more surprising to me if Source is synced to Maya, or XSI, or anything common than if it isn't.
Sorry Farfarer I don't have any useful info for you.
Perhaps I can email them and they'll tell me. They've always been helpful and friendly in the past
edit: I think I've found it. I'll check tomorrow and see
Might not be able to actually test it with SourceSDK for a day or two though. I'll keep you posted
Here's 1-smooth-group cube I was testing with;
The code I'm using says 2005 on it, but the SDK version I'm testing is 2007 (can't make mods on 2009 I don't think).
I'll check tomorrow that it's not changed since then if I can.
Well, that was a nice excercise, at least...
If you find otherwise, please send me your meshes and I'll try and find out why.
(maybe he looked at valve's code?)
With 1SG/no hard edges though?
Or after you've taken the time to make the smoothing look good with default max shaders?
I don't think it means, what you think it means.
Normal Map, no matter the baker, won't automatically show seams or make your model look bad, they will take the data and show it as it's meant to be shown. Even if it's a very dirty NRM Map in the renderer, it will still show it's meant to be shown pending on how you baked it, as long the 'process' was clean.
In this case, in the case of Source and XN, from the looks of it, you can get rid of the more 'mundane' tasks, which will take several minutes to hours to fix and make sure 'it looks right', and can squeeze out extra shortcuts to get the asset looking as you wish.
Or maybe Valve sneaked it during the entire Source Film-Maker time? Wouldn't surprise me if they did, making lives of newbies who don't know baking just for visual purposes that much easier.
When you say 1 smoothing group cube, do you mean a cube where all faces are smoothed + continuous (t net I guess) UV's, or a cube with no smoothing (all hard edges / split uv's)? If it's the former is the idea to show that the normals are synched and even the crap cube will look right with the baked normal? Time to read EQ's recent thread again!
How do you change what maths xnormal bakes with?
What should I be using if Marmoset Toolbag is my target engine? I've looked through the documentation but didn't find any reference to what tangent basis it uses.
The real benefits of MikkTSpace are all of the safety checks it has. It accounts for a lot of edge cases and potential screw ups to give rock solid consistency across a wide array of circumstances.
Yes, 1 smooth group so it's all smoothed, the UVs are a standard cube "cross" shape. And yes, the idea is that (within the limitations of all normal maps) if you've got a synced baker/renderer that even a crap model like a smoothed cube will look correct.
xNormal has a drop-down for Tangent Calculator plugins in it's options (plug-shaped button on the bottom left). You'll need to get some more to see anything other than the default MikkTSpace option there, though.
Not sure what Marmoset uses. I imagine if you export an FBX with tangents and binormals in it, then it'll use those.