Baking normals for CryEngine 3

fattkid

Hey folks,

Just starting on learning CryEngine - Curious how folks are baking out their normal maps etc. I understand the general process of creating normals (from high res geo) - More so curious about CryEngine specific stuff.

(This is also in regards to hard surface/mechanical modeling)

How or are you using shading groups/hard edges? - I ask because I read in a few places online (at crydev) that all your edges should be soft. I did so, baked in xnormal with Max tangent space, and it seemed fine in game.

I kknow there is a Cryegine tangent plug in for XN older version - are folks using that? Or not using that and still getting good results?

Are you adding axtra edges/bevels to things?

How about mirroring normal maps? Does that work well? Any caveats?

Any other advice/tips/tricks/info/links anyone has on the matter would be greatly appreciated, especially in regards to hard surface stuff. Thanks.

Drew++

You can bake normals just like you would for any other engine, like Unity or UDK. CE3 has it's own tangent basis, but it's fairly close to xNormals default. You can get a plugin for xNormal that uses CryEngine tangent basis. You can also use the Polybump app.

Hope this helps.

fattkid

Thanks Drew -

Yeah, the fact that at the crydev site said use all soft edges and it seemed to work fine got me wondering. I did try polybump, but the bake wasnt as good as XN. I was told that tool is pretty old and not particularly awesome as well.

Drew++

Hopefully we can see more custom plugins, or apps that support CE3's native tangent basis. I was chatting with the Handplane guys about maybe implementing a CE3 tangent basis output We'll see!

two_larsens

Hi,

I really suggest not to use any XN-like programs, but rather bake normal maps from your general 3D package - like 3DS Max, or Maya. You get better results - particularly if there's any complexity to the mesh. Normal maps actually look great applied in CryEngine, as long as you have a proper sized buffer for seams and overlaps. That is often something that looks bad on models - a clearly visible seam. It goes, more or less, 8 buffer for a 1024 x 1024, and 16 buffer for 2048, to keep UV islands apart. So, that's what I would suggest.