My Normal maps show a seam along the middle. I have no idea how to fix it.

Glacierfox

HI there. I've been reading lots of posts on here surrounding normal maps seams. I have actually had this problem for a while and not yet found a solution. I have created a simple model here, sculpted it, and baked the high poly onto the low poly to test.
The Uv's are mirrored.




As you can see there is a visible seam along the middle. I have searched all over the internet and I am wondering is anyone has a decent solution to this. I have actually had this problem before and altered a uni project just to get past this issue.

Here are the UV's




As you can see I have moved them along 1 UV unit as recommended on the Polycount wiki and also tried with the mirrored UV's directly on top of the others with the same result.

I'm using XNormal and this always happens. I have the swizzle settings correct for 3ds max and have also tried every other combination. I have also tried flipping the green channel in Photoshop but to no avail.

I understand UDK uses some sort of Detail map to dampen this effect but I intended to render in 3DS MAX. I simply cant find a good solution for my problem. I'm actually creating a Dota 2 item and Its recommended I mirror to obviously allow for a better quality texture. How do they do it? I don't want a huge seam along mine! haha.

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks, Danny

Pabs

as dustin said,
i believe it's your gamma settings

poopipe

I believe it's because Xnormal uses a different tangent basis to Max


if you want a clean bake for max, use max to bake it

read the sticky thread on tangent basis / nmt baking and you'll understand

Mark Dygert

In 2013 they turned on Gamma/LUT by default which technically gives you lighting closer to what you see in the real world (or some other nonsense) but in reality all it does is jack up normal maps for people who don't care about rendering.

Main Menu > Customize > Preferences > Gamma/LUT > Disable

with Gamma/LUT on, it "corrects" the maps and screws up the values in normal maps.

You can render with Gamma/LUT on but when you pick the map you have to preemptively override the Gamma, as you pick the map, so the gamma correction doesn't affect the values of that map.

This is the only place that I know of where you can override the gamma, which is pretty retarded on autodesks part but it works.

Glacierfox

Thanks for the replys everyone! Mark Dygert you are a savour! I have disabled the GammaLUT seeting and everything is fine now running my Tnagent base Nomrmal Map!. Finally. Thank you so much!

snegir'

Hi. Does anybody know any scripts, that can automatically separate uvs with differnt smoothing groups ?