Tec-9 help

BMovie

Ive starting building a tec-9 over the last week, i have done the highpoly version of the gun.
I have started doing the LP version and have built most of it now.
I decided to do some Normal map testing to see if there would be any problems with the barrel of the gun. I have ran into a few normal map errors that im not able to fix. Im not sure if it's to do with how i've built the LP barrel or if im doing something wrong with the normal map.

I did the normal map in 3ds max using projection.

Any help would or advice on how it could be fix be appreciated.

Triangulation with normal map.

Doxturtle

Are your smoothing groups set up correctly?

Try making all edges inside the holes their own islands, and make them a seperate smoothing group.

Make the outside face of the barrel all one smoothing group.

Vincent Geelen

Marmoset has an option to change the normal source on a mesh, it's not set to 3ds Max by default I think. Did you change that one?

BertR

Hi, as Doxturtle said, this is most likely due to the smoothing groups of your model.

There's some more useful documentation regarding this here:

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_map#Smoothing_Groups_.26_Hard_Edges

BMovie

@vincent geelen, I flipped the normal (green I think) in marmoset if that's what you mean.

@Doxturtle no I didn't, I set everything to one smoothing group. I'll reset the smoothing groups up for the hard edges and repost if that work.

@Bertr thank you for the link, I'll have read through.

a.marlowe696

Doxturtle wrote: »

Are your smoothing groups set up correctly?

Try making all edges inside the holes their own islands, and make them a seperate smoothing group.

Make the outside face of the barrel all one smoothing group.

Doxturtle is right. Since those holes are a 90 degree angle and there's no supporting edges or bevels you have to make the edge hard (sorry for Maya terms) in addition to separating them onto their own island in the UV's. The UV island rule only applies when you are baking down from a high poly FYI, but it's still good practice.

This video explains it really well. You do not need the software; however, they do a great job at explaining whats happening to your model:

https://youtu.be/ciXTyOOnBZQ

Hope this helps!

BMovie

@ a.marlowe696 thank you for the link to the video, it did help explain a few things to me about normal maps.

Thx to all your help ive managed to sort out the errors on the barrel. I did the smoothing groups and split the inner parts into there own UV's

Update

BMovie

the errors on the barrel seem to persist, i didnt take a close enough look at the normal map last time. even though at a distance it looked fixed, close up there was some errors that came to my attention when texturing in substance Designer.



Image 1: Close up of barrel in Marmoset showing the small errors
Image 2: Showing the same Normal map but from a distance, too me it looks fine.
Image 3: Edge wear in Substance Designer brings out all the small errors of the normal map.
Image 4: Shows the Wireframe of the model.

UV's


In my Uv's, anything with an edge i have split off into there own uv islands. ive also added smoothing groups to the barrel.
Ive tried planar mapping each side so its flat but the seems to make everything worse.
Ive tried Triangulating the mesh before normal mapping, instead of normal mapping with quads, that didnt seem to work.
Im not sure if its to do with how i have modeled the barrel

Any other advice would be appreciated on the matter.

thank you.

Odeca

85-90° edges needs to be absolutly hard edges, and you have to split them in the UV map as well,with a bit of edge padding. Hard edge = UV seam, remember always that.

Don't know how projection works, I use cages and xnormal, but there must be something really wrong since I see a lot of clipping errors. So you might want to check your settings as well

A tip, keep the low poly mesh shading as clean as possible.

BMovie

thank you all for your advice on how to fix my normals, i played around with it for a while but couldn't get a clean bake.
In the end i decided to re-build the front section of the barrel with slightly different topology, took on board what everyone said and it seemed to work.

Here is the final Model.


All the texturing was done with substance designer, minus the normal map text which was done in photoshop.

It is also uploaded here using the marmoset Viewer on artstartion.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/tec-9-dcaa0183-07f5-49a8-a79f-3f3cb833f4f2