3ds max vs Xnormal bakes differences
polycounter lvl 10
Playing around with baking in 3ds max and Xnormal and noticed some big differences between them. For some reason 3ds max bake give much worse results than Xnormal's... Skewed details, shading artifacts. Both are viewed in Marmoset with proper tangent spaces and baked with the same cage. Is there something wrong I did with baking in 3ds max?
http://i.imgur.com/7vtntqV.jpg -xnormal
http://i.imgur.com/ZoR5pso.jpg -3ds max
http://i.imgur.com/7vtntqV.jpg -xnormal
http://i.imgur.com/ZoR5pso.jpg -3ds max
Replies
Yeah I could show you some posts from a year or two ago but I don't have them bookmarked or anything. However, it was rather unanimously decided that when it comes to normal maps, and you aren't going to just being using 3dsmax as a rendering utility (i.e you want to use the model in a game, marmoset toolbag, etc.), you should use Maya or xNormal to bake normals. 3dsmax rather unfortunately gave the most sub-par results.
The problems for me aren't so much technical, most of the time those are forgivable, but workflow... oh boy... it-be-WONKY.
If you add more than one output map type then it fubar's the padding.
If you render normal maps with Mental Ray it will also turn the background white, even if the background color is set to the correct shade of blue in RTT.
So if you want to use max you have to...
Other known bugs and annoyances:
If you have anything but single selected in the "Render Output Dialog" (completely separate window) it will start rendering out maps for each frame. If you aren't paying attention it might look like its taking a really long time to render, but actually its rendering the same map 100 times. Setting it to single screws you over later, if you render animations with Batch Render. Having it set to single will cause max to write every frame to a single file, even if you specify a range and tell it to override the Render Output Dialog, hoooray!
Basically it's a huge clusterfuck.
About the only thing Max has going for it is that your editing app and your baking app are the same so you aren't dancing back and forth between two programs. You can edit the projection cage in max which is nice, but with Nitrous viewport you can't turn on the shaded cage, it makes it 100% opaque so it's kind of useless, with all of the dancing you have to do inside of max, to get "mediocre results" its actually less hassle to use xNormal, ha.
Maybe they finally fixed all of the baking workflow issues in newer versions of max. They've been in there since 3dsmax2008-09, I'm on 2014 and they are still there.
A lot of people will use Max to get most of the major bugs worked out, then jump to xNormal for a final bake. xNormal also bakes out cavity maps which max does but not through RTT and it doesn't projection bake from high to low, it only samples the same model, which would be your low poly... which is kind of pointless, heh.
I'd like to mention that you dont need to render them one by one; the AO seems to be the only one that is causing this issue. If you render just AO, or everything except AO, the padding turns out just as it should. I solve this by setting all the textures, I save my scene and delete the offending shaders, then render; reload the scene, render the remaining shaders (after deleting the opposite ones), reload once more so that I get them all back into the RTT dialogue again. While still bothersome, it's the AO map that is the only culprit from my experience.
I cant find that same topic again (was months ago) but I discovered that AO is the problem from one of Mark's own posts, thanks.
I think I'll look back into xNormal again though. I'm only sticking to Max cause I dont need many maps so far (diffuse, map, AO) so it's not such a hassle until this turns complex.
You could also render out a world space normal map in 3ds Max and use Handplane to convert it to your target game engine. (assuming the tanget space calculator in 3ds max is your only issue)