Normal mapping a simple box.

Hayden Zammit

Hey everyone.

I'm trying to learn more about UDK so I'm making an interior environment.

A simple square cardboard box is giving me trouble. I've tried every way I can think of to do the UVs and the smoothing groups but I just can't get it to look any good. I baked it down from a simple highpoly using Xnormal.

Can someone point me in the basic direction for how to make normal maps for UDK. UDK is driving me nuts.

mAlkAv!An

Looks like you didn't use a cage for baking.

Also if you are going to use static/prebaked lighting, keep in mind that lightmap seams cause edges to look hard no matter of normals or smoothing groups.

Obscura

Unfortunately UDK is not working good with normalmaps in a lot of cases.
Try this:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/XNormalWorkflow.html
Or if its still not good then, give Handplane a try.
Also, as mAlkAv!An said, baked lighting can mess up things, but I never got that brutal result, so Im not sure if its because of lightmass.So viewing it in real time lighting can tell more about where the problem is coming from.

WarrenM

Watch this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciXTyOOnBZQ

Hayden Zammit

Thanks guys. Feel like such an idiot for not being able to bake something simple like this.

I followed that UDK Xnormal tutorial originally. That's how I got those bad results.

I must be doing something really wrong, because I always get this result no matter what I try and bake.

ZacD

Where ever you have a hard edge there should be a uv split, in that video the uv's are seperate for each face of the box, but not on your model.

WarrenM

Right, you either need to make each face on that box a floating UV island with padding or make the whole box one smoothing group (probably won't look great).

Obscura

WarrenM wrote: »

Right, you either need to make each face on that box a floating UV island with padding or make the whole box one smoothing group (probably won't look great).

Theoretically it needs to look great after using that Xnormal method, but yeah it probably wont.

Hayden Zammit

Hey guys, thanks for all the tips. I think I'm starting to understand the hell that is lightmaps a little better now. I've made some progress on the normals, but there's a few things I can't figure out.

Here's how it looks in an interior scene I'm working on:



Here's how it looks in one of the default UDK maps. You can see the normal map is working a lot better:



But there's some problems on the back:

ForbiddenDonut

Can you post the UV sheet for your light map? It looks like you're getting some shadow bleeding. Try giving your shells a bit more padding. They need considerably more space between them compared to the texture UVs.

Quack!

The default scene shot you posted is not using lightmaps. The shot you posted from you scene is using lightmaps. The problem is that if you don't weld edges of lightmaps together, the light won't bleed around the edge and cause harsh edges like that. To minimize this effect you have to weld the edges of your lightmap uvs as much as possible. Ideally, your object lightmaps will have zero seams, but that isn't possible, so make sure you choose your uv seams logically and hide them in areas that will be seen the least.