XNormals still an accpted workflow?
vertex
I have a question in the industry is xnormals still used as a way that you would create normals? I seen a lot of fellow artist talk about Modo and substance as a replacement and even some using max or Maya even ZBrush to create maps like this.
Replies
what makes said alternatives more viable?
Faster and/or easier to use or better quality?
@MDiamond : Even with the "compute Binormals in pixel shader option" on ? I'd really like to have failure cases because that should be a 100% match now. Maybe we should move that discussion to PM or the Substance support threads in order to not derail that thread.
Maybe I can be more specific.
What specific qualities have appeared in which alternate software that put them above xNormals, if any?
Oh, this is possible.
MODO 901 supports custom tangent basis now. And Substance's baking tools, along with Knald and Mightybake are fairly new to the scene, and will bake to MikkTSpace. So before then, you really only had xNormal if you wanted to bake to a specific tangent basis (and Handplane).
There's a lot more choice these days
1-Unless I'm mistaken, XN is widely believed to give the best quality, but take slightly more time, and only prints normals in MikkTSpace, correct?
2-The "only" two advantages of other bakers, are time & tangent basis options, correct?
3-(a little off-topic) No matter the baker, you still need the same things (low, high, cage) to bake correct normals? (if the low and high are simply enough, then perhaps you can just bake with averaged normals like in SD/SP and skip using a cage)
1- XN gives high quality. When baking 8-Bit it makes banding rather than dithering (3DSMax dithers instead), it's not a quality issue, just something you need to know.
I'm not sure if it's considered slow, in my experience it's not worse than Maya.
XN has its own default algorythm. It is not limited to Mikk. In fact, Mikk TS is an option that has to be activated via the Plug-In manager.
XN supports Unity Tangent Space too, via plug-in as well.
This partially answers question 2 as well - XN supports synced workflow to various engines
3- Actually, alternate techniques exist. You already mentioned skipping the cage with SD, I'd also point to:
Renderer based smooth corners
This allows to avoid modeling a highpoly
Custom vertex normals
A technique used to avoid baking entirely, using "mid-poly" meshes
XNormal quality is fine, although it only supports 16bit output via TIFF format (and EXR, but that's a hefty format to use).
XNormal supports specific tangent bases via plugins. It's still the only baker outside of MODO that does, as far as I'm aware of. Although Handplane works for a lot of engines.
You don't need a cage with xNormal any more than you do for other software. It's recommended you use one, but if you can get away without it then fair enough :P