xNormal Issue

Cuboids! 64

Having another problem, this time it's baking my hipoly stuff to a lopoly mesh with xNormal. I'm not sure where I messed up in the process but my normals and base textures keep coming out like this.



Bits of pieces of the mesh join into one another regardless of the polygroups i've set in zBrush. Basically everything a different color was meant to be its own island. I'm not sure if it's because my UVs were bad or what. I must admit i'm not super familiar with xNormal. Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

pmiller001

To my knowledge x normals is really only used for details, and not textures. Are you using the ray distance calculator? If you are, try simply not using it, I get pretty good results without it, and if you actually need to edit the cage, you might just try doing that manually instead of using the ray distance calculator.

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Quack!

Cuboids! 64 wrote: »

Having another problem, this time it's baking my hipoly stuff to a lopoly mesh with xNormal. I'm not sure where I messed up in the process but my normals and base textures keep coming out like this.



Bits of pieces of the mesh join into one another regardless of the polygroups i've set in zBrush. Basically everything a different color was meant to be its own island. I'm not sure if it's because my UVs were bad or what. I must admit i'm not super familiar with xNormal. Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

I'm still not quite clear as to what your issue is.

You said that each color should be it's own island, so you would have to do that in the uvs. Xnormal will just bake base color to whatever you have your uv's laid out as.

Cuboids! 64

Yeah, i'm not too sure myself either. To be honest i'm not sure if I even should be using xnormal for this (character for a short animation).

@TeriyakiStyle: Oh, didn't know this was a thing! Thanks, but i'm not sure how to bake it after exploding it.

Is it obvious i'm kind of a green newbie yet? :poly139:

pmiller001

You might do well to give us a screen shot of each step. Because I'm not too sure what exactly your question is

Cuboids! 64

Well I unwrapped and made proper UVs for each subtool, then merged a hipoly and lopoly version and used UV master to make islands for the lopoly, and then used Grouped UV Tiles for the hipoly.



And these seem to look fine, or at least as fine as I need them to be. Then I make a texture from polypaint from the hipoly mesh with the new uvs, and thene xport all that to be used in xnormal. There I put everything where it goes, hipoly in hipoly, lopoly in lopoly, and texture in base texture to bake. But then the texture ends up like that with weird strips of color where they shouldn't be. Like that big island of red shouldn't have those yellow and brown bits.

I'm sorry if this is hard to understand, i'm sure if i'm even getting the process down right.

Cuboids! 64

I apologize for the double post but I think i've found a much easier way to explain my issue.

I decided to do all the subtools seperately, and that seems to have fixed my 'issue' for most of them, except for the character's shorts.



The strange cuff shape on the right isn't on my model at all. I don't know where it came from or why it's there.

ExcessiveZero

Dunno if it helps nor what you are using but exporting from max I have had a whole range of issues in the past a lot like yours and what fixes them is exporting in .SBM format and using the ray distance calculator for about 15-25 seconds

Cuboids! 64

I should preface i've been exporting them straight from zBrush, sorry.

Quack!

So what is happening is that baking down the mesh is causing your rays to 'catch' colors from neighboring areas. You have to play with the front and rear distance settings. If you are using this for real time you should bake with a cage if you are using more then 1 smoothing group for your low poly.

Also, for future reference, it is best to align your uv's so that they are oriented correctly. So make sure the face has the two eyes horizontally aligned, etc. Makes texturing easier if you are working outside of your sculpting app.

Cuboids! 64

That's fixed it, thanks!