Turtle Hardware Visualizer Problem

nbreslow

Hi All,

I am having an issue with Turtle in Maya 2013 when using the Hardware Bake Visualizer (ilrHwBakeVisualize). Specifically, I am trying to use it to show my normal map bake and am getting all sorts of display artifacts and culling problems.

• Normals are all facing the proper direction.
• UV winding seems fine (not using any overlapped UVs anyway)
• Bake is fine, I can get the normal map to display properly using the standard Maya convention with a bump2d node.

I have tried the following:

• Flipping normals
• Flipping UVs
• Changing Tangent Space Coordinate Right to Left

The only thing that improved the problem was toggling Double Sided OFF in the Render Stats. This got rid of the black artifacts but there are still some strange culling issues.

These two images show the problem (body only) - 1st has Double Sided ON, 2nd has Double Sided OFF.

Sort of at a loss here, I hadn't used Turtle in this way for a while but this is such a useful feature I would like to get it working properly if possible.

System Specs
Maya 2013 SP2 x64 on Win 7
Quadro 5000 Driver v. 306.79

Thanks in advance!

-Nick

BARDLER

Some times in Maya when you attach a file to the shader it activates the transparency node. If you go into the attribute editor for the shader, and right click on transparency you should see an option to break connection. That should fix it.

nbreslow

Hi BARDLER,

Thanks for the reply. I double checked to see if anything was happening with transparency and I couldn't find anything.

The way the setup works is that the ilrHwBakeVisualize is connected to the Maya shader (Blinn, Lambert, etc.) Hardware Shader slot. Then every bake you want to preview flows through the visualizer node so that is really where I think there might be an issue. Maybe it isn't compatible with 2013? Not sure, if anyone has it working with a Normal Map please let me know.

I tried playing around in the connection editor a bit but nothing helped. Any other suggestions welcome!

-Nick

nbreslow

I had forgot this - here is what I did to get it working:

When you start Maya the Default Quality Renderer is active and Hardware Texturing is greyed out in the Shading dropdown. Switching to High Quality Rendering allows you to enable Hardware Texturing. Here is where the problem occured:

Turtle's Bake Visualizer only works properly in the Default Quality Renderer. If you switch back to Default Quality Rendering then Hardware Texturing will still be enabled and everything will display properly.

From the manual:

In order to get proper output from the hardware shader, make sure that the option Shading \ Hardware Texturing in the viewport menu has been enabled, and that Renderer \ Default Quality Rendering is set.

-Nick

bugo

Another thing I found is that Turtle Hardware preview doesnt work with mirroring. Such a shame...

nbreslow

I actually never tried it with mirroring..does it say that in the docs? If not I will flip a few switches and see if it will cooperate. Glad I got it to work tho, nice little feature.

-N