Failing miserably with render to texture

Signovinces

What am i doing wrong in 3ds max trying to RTT a normal map (first picture)? I have turned off final gather and there are no lights in the scene and the low poly cage is not even close to being inside the high poly object. The UV's are not overlapping. Second pisture is how the normal map looks when i open it with photoshop (very wrong looking).

Noors

The rtt render in max doesn't reflect the final file.
It renders a complete map. In your case, object is black because you have no light. However it (may) shows in red what are the pixels missed during projection.
Be sure your cage enveloppes the highpoly everywhere.
Try to reset xform your objects first.
Under "projections mapping" in the RTT, click "options", then be sure that "tangent" is checked because your map looks like an object space normal map (unless you want that). Might be due to weird object scale/normals tho.

XilenceX

Try putting a skylight in to see what's going on?
Also your normalmap should be in the directory&format you specified in the BTT window. Even if you failed completely with the bake for some reason it will still have that average blue color in the empty parts of your UV space... so that black image can't be the normalmap.

joeriv

Signovinces wrote: »

I have turned off final gather

you bake normal maps with the standard scanline renderer, not mental ray.

Signovinces

Making some progress after your comments but still doesn't look like something i would get from xNormal or nDo2. It's still black in the render window though and not grayish like all the tutorials i have watched.

Noors

Well this one looks good. If you have only 1 smoothing group, this is the normal result. You might want to assgin 1 smoothing grooup per face, so the normal map hasn't to compensate heavyly your mesh normals with all those gradients.
As i said, the render window is a complete map, which means a render with all lights/materials/environnement, whatever..in your scene. It's not reflecting the render to texture result. As you have no light, the object is black. Put a light, and the object will be lighted and gray. But it wont change anything to your normal map.

Signovinces

Noors wrote: »

Well this one looks good. If you have only 1 smoothing group, this is the normal result. You might want to assgin 1 smoothing grooup per face, so the normal map hasn't to compensate heavyly your mesh normals with all those gradients.
As i said, the render window is a complete map, which means a render with all lights/materials/environnement, whatever..in your scene. It's not reflecting the render to texture result. As you have no light, the object is black. Put a light, and the object will be lighted and gray. But it wont change anything to your normal map.

Ah, smoothing roups affect the normal map. You learn something new everyday as a noob

Thank you for the help!