Normal maps ruin reflections

dzibarik

I have a problem with adding scratches to the body of the car I modelled. I decided not to bake the whole shape and go with higher polycount. But I still need normal maps for wear and tear and some minor damage/details. But when I apply normal maps they totally ruin my reflections.

I baked only these small strips

1)Without normal maps



2)With normal maps



What can be done about this?

marks

Did you try flipping normalmap Y ?

dzibarik

yes, I tried. it's different but still as bad.

I see that there is no way currently to do damage without baking. I wonder how they damage cars in GTA without using them? Do they decals for that? Here's the thread about issue I'm talking about - http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95651

Here's another one with a clean bake by Simon Fuchs -http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=94200&

Xoliul

Need for Speed and Forza do damage by just overlaying some generated or painted damage maps. They don't bake new maps for every single car. I think some of them also involve blending in some tiling crumpled normal maps on damage zones.

Of course if you want to do some unique set-piece car (and not one that needs to fit into a system with dozens of others) you can do it differently.

dzibarik

Xoliul wrote: »

Of course if you want to do some unique set-piece car (and not one that needs to fit into a system with dozens of others) you can do it differently.

but how? I'm currently redoing my low poly for this and I intended to make some noises in Substance Designer and put them on low poly without baking any information from high poly. Is it possible or will I get errors like because there is no information from high poly? Should I bake from high poly even if my model is like 100 000 tris and I want to do some damage to the car?

dzibarik

ok, this is f***ing it for baking in Modo. It messes up even simple baking. No way I'm baking there again. I mean if some people found a way to bake there with no problems then good for them but I won't use it even to bake a simple plane. Urgh.

No problems with reflections after baking simple details in 3d Coat and Substance Designer.

I don't why baking in Modo is effed up. There must be something wrong with my setup, I don't know what else.

Farfarer

How are you baking in Modo? It works well for me.

dzibarik

I do it like I always do, but it just doesn't work. By not working I mean producing strange results. It looks like it baked ok and captured some details but empty spaces in a normal map - just plain blue spaces - break reflections. I create a layer, change it from diffuse to normal, then I bake from object to texture. I did it with and without a cage - it's the same.

I also noticed that normal maps in Modo are ligther compared to what other apps produce. May be that's the source of the problem.

Farfarer

It's the tangent basis. Normal maps from Modo won't work in Marmoset perfectly.

The best you'll get is baking a shading normal render output and using that as an object space map inside Marmoset.

dzibarik

I think Handplane might help then. I'll try it later.