XNormal not working for normal maps?

AllyAlbon

I am down much of my hair, so I hope to keep what's left!

Xnormal, working absolutely fine up to this point, my go to generator for normal and AO maps including some fairly complicated stuff.

I have built a reasonably basic building, and a high poly version which has a few bricks sticking out, extra decorations around the windows etc, all in Maya. Nothing that complicated, really.

However, for some reason when I generate a normal map, it doesn't find the extra detail on the high poly (the base building is exactly the same as the low poly). It is driving me mad. Have tried reexporting, cleaning it up, resaving, resizing... nada.

The AO map generated perfectly which is not helping my lack of understanding why the normal map can't find the new details?

Heelp!

.Wiki

Could you upload some pictures of your objects? Are your brick details tapered or do they stick out straight. If they aren´t tapered xNormal won´t recognize them because the raycast cant see the "slope" to generate the normal mapped detail.
Another tip, normally you don´t bake large objects like buildings. Some nice tilable textures can give you better results with less texture space. Details like your stones could be created with real geometry or decals .

EarthQuake

Yep that sounds right, if your brick has infinitely hard edges there are no normals for the normal map baker to catch.

AllyAlbon

Thanks guys, that was a really useful tip - had not even thought about the whole straight/slope thing. Alas, the model was just not baking (although other similar tests were) and so I just ended up modelling the stuff instead of a simple map. Thanks again!