Baking normals for CryEngine

Mathew O

Hi guys,

I'm a Maya user and have been building a scene in cryengine but I've found that the normals that I bake with xnormal and take into cryengine don't look great. Almighty_gir did a normal bake out of max for me and it looks ideal, I was wondering whether there is an easier way to get nice normals without having to go into max purely just to bake my normals, maybe even using Maya?

I'm pretty sure the issues i'm having are due to the tangent space calculator and max's just seems to work better with cryengine than Mikk - Tspace.

Thanks guys

Edit: It's not the green channel that needs flipping.

Cap

Try baking an object space normal map and converting it with Handplane (http://www.handplane3d.com/), that way you wouldnt have to through all the trouble of setting up a bake in max

MM

try working with triangulated mesh from baking to export. it works on my end with latest freeSDK and Maya.

Zepic

Cap wrote: »

Try baking an object space normal map and converting it with Handplane (http://www.handplane3d.com/), that way you wouldnt have to through all the trouble of setting up a bake in max

I've talked with the guys who made handplane and they said there isn't a tangent space calculator for the Cryengine. They said something about not being allowed access to the source code (or something along those lines).

I know that their is a plugin for an older version of XNormal (the plugin might not show up in the newer version) that allows you to properly bake out the right tangents for the Cryengine. You can find it here:
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/COMMUNITY/xNormal+Plugin

Cap

Zepic wrote: »

I've talked with the guys who made handplane and they said there isn't a tangent space calculator for the Cryengine. They said something about not being allowed access to the source code (or something along those lines).

Never said there was a tangent space calculator for CE, OP wanted a way to get a max bake without going through the trouble of setting one up (cause he feels max bakes look better than maya in CE) and you can get that with Handplane (IE Object Space normal baked in maya and then converted to a TS normal map with max as the target).

Does suck that there isnt a CE target in handplane tho

SlyRipper

Well the first thing is that, as Zepic said there's an older version of an tangent based calculator for xNormal. But as already mentioned it only works with one specific version (the link says it).

But on the other hand I had no trouble baking stuff with xNormal, everything looked nice in CE as I wanted it to look (using max for obj export). There are not much settings, and the most important is to set -Y (but I guess you already set that). I had no troubles using newest xNormal version for baking in CE.

If you still can't make it work properly, then you could use the older xNormal version or another tool like handplane, also already mentioned ^^

(Mainly wanted to point out that there's no real problem with xNormal and CE ;-)