<STUCK>First time doing normal maps

Dynames215

Hi Everyone,

Im new with normal maps, im currently following milleniums shotgun tutorial.
Everything was going smoothly untill i came across normal mapping.
(look at the attachment) The screenshot at the top is just the low poly model and the screenshot at the bottom is WITH normal map. For some reason some parts get black in the mesh and i get smoothing errors.

Heres the 1st question: How can i fix the black errors in my mesh?

Im using xoliul shader and when i flip the green within the mat. editor the black parts are fixed but the ones that were good are now black... I already tried to flip the greens in photoshop, flip the green and red in max but it all doesnt work. :poly142:

walkonsky

for the black parts: check the normals in your meshes. some of them are inverted which results in those black areas.
the smoothing errors might be connected to smoothing groups. make sure that they are set up correctly on your lowpoly mesh.

theSixtyEight

when u got ur UV unwrap window openeed, hit Select -> inverted face and if some of faces are selected, u can just flip them horizontally or vertically by flippng them one by one with Tools -> Flip horizontally/flip vertically (Select and Tools are located up there in UV window)

AMS-G

I had a similar problem with this earlier. If you're using xNormal, you can set the smooth normals option to harden normals. Hope that helps.

mr_ace

post your normal map to see if it's wrong. try applying the normal map in a default max shader, not xoluil and see if the problems still there.