3dsmax 2014 normals bug

cw

Hey folks,

First of all - I'm a crusty old seadog and I know all about normals so please don't hassle me about smoothing groups and so on.

I think there's a bug in max 2014 where tangent basis gets messed with somewhat randomly. I can get a situation where adding edit normals modifier temporarily fixes up the TBN (appears so anyway) - if you then collapse to edit poly it looks fine until you deselect the mesh, at which point it gets messed up (until you do that process again)

Pretty annoying. Has anyone else had such a thing happen?

ta,

MephistonX

I think i've had this bug, if you select you mesh in edit poly mode, make a copy as an element, then delete the original. It should fix, if not then that's a separate max bug... of many...

Mark Dygert

Is this a mesh you imported from some other app? I get it with OBJ's from zbrush.
IF so apply UVW and weld all the verts and collapse the stack, even if they all look welded it forces max to rewrite a section of the model's information that fixes the problem.

You can also get around it (sometimes) by creating a box, applying edit poly to it, then attaching your mesh to the box and deleting the box element. But I have greater success with the first method.

Outside of that...
What does it look like?
Are you using Nitrous or Direct3D, OpenGL or software?
Make sure you update your video card drivers.
Toggle between Realistic and Shaded view.
Add lights to your scene and set realistic mode to use scene lights.
Render the scene and see if the normals come out ok.
Check to see if you have Gamma/LUT turned on, if so, make sure your normal map is set to override.

cw

Bless you sir, but it's not all that stuff. Definitely something fishy with the TBN under the hood. I'll see if I can grab a movie so it's clear to see.

I will double check the UVS although they appear all clean.

Thx for the ideas!