Normals Skewing in 3DO

PlateCaptain

Hi Everyone,

I'm running into a weird issue working in NDO and previewing in 3DO.

As you can see below, I'm drawing straight line segments in NDO and converting them to part of the normal map. I've put my UV Layout down as a guide.

In the 3DO preview (and also in Blender, if I export and apply the normal map), though, parts of that line are getting skewed. Has anyone seen this before? Any idea what's going on?

The UV Layout shown as a guide is actually even lower-poly than my low poly model itself, which is the same thing but with a double bevel applied to some of the sharper edges of the model. I'm not sure if/why that would cause this skewing, but I thought I'd mention it.

Sammy101

Perhaps your UVs are not fully 100% in the correct original position. If they are manually moved/skewed then your drawing will not be correct fully. Try relaxing your UVs and see if that helps, other than that, I don't know.

final_fight

Problem is with UVs. How does your model hold checker texture?

PlateCaptain

Taking the UVs out of the picture doesn't change anything - they're set on top of the normal map, so the Suite is bringing them in as normal map data, which is how they're showing up on the model in 3DO. I can turn off that layer in Photoshop, and it won't show up in 3DO anymore, but this distortion with the real normals still happens.

It's easiest to see the issue at the 90 degree bend - it's a fairly smooth bend in the normal map, but in 3DO it's bending much more than that, and more often.

Even the UV Layout image I'm using as a guide is being distorted on the model in 3DO, so I feel like it must have something to do with the model itself, but I'm not sure what.

final_fight

What? The image of UVs have to with this. It's how they are unwrapped I am talking about.

PlateCaptain

There's two different UVs here - the actual UVs that are unwrapped and a part of the model, and what's basically a screenshot of the UV layout that I've pasted into Photoshop to use as a guide.

It makes sense to me that something with the actual UVs are causing this problem, which I think is what you're suggesting. But I don't see how the guide UV image would mess anything up. I've used that method many times before without any issues.

Can you elaborate on how the actual UV unwrapping might cause this? It looks like there's stretching/distortion only in small areas, while other areas just a few pixels away in the same UV island are fine, which seems strange to me.