Black seams at UV island borders with DDO generated curvature map

Hupie

I'm doing some experimenting on a simple test cube with baked maps and I can't seem to get a correct curvature map to mask off convex and concave areas. I'm close but I'm getting black and white edges/seams at UV border seams. Im wondering if this can be solved as I know DDO only looks at the 2d normal map information and not at the actual model.

Is this something other people have encountered too and is there a solution to get a nice curvature mask without black or white seams? I tried both with and without padding but the problem remains in both situations.

Synaesthesia

Is this curvature map that you're using generated by DDO from your normal map input, or is it from a curvature map that you manually specified?

Hupie

It is generated by DDO.

Synaesthesia

Would you be okay with uploading your source project? I'd like to take a look at this in 1.8 and see if I can replicate it.

Hupie

Of course, thanks for the help! You can download it here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4406779/DDo%20Xn%20padding.rar

I also supplied the Max file with highpoly and lowpoly, in case the baked maps are incorrect.

Synaesthesia

Thanks, Hupie! I have your project files, but I'd like to look at your input maps. I'd have to edit the project.xml file to re-path all of the textures to my local directories before I could use your project.

I currently don't have enough time to re-render everything from the Max source file, but I can check your files for you. If you don't mind uploading those as well, along with the source *.OBJ, I'll gladly take a look at it!

Hupie

Hey Synaesthesia,

Sorry for the delay. I got a bit busy and forgot about this issue. You can get the input maps here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4406779/Xn%20bake.rar

If you can still have a look and find a way to get a good curvature map (and masking), let me know, thanks!

Synaesthesia

I can do something better than that! Check your PMs.

Raane

I've found the curvature maps to be a real source of frustration for my workflow. The ones DDO Creates are tuned to DDO but are created from normal map information treat the entire texture space as a single entity so you can get some bleeding detail between UVs and weirdness going on at seams as it tries to interpret normal detail outside the UV space as features. Looks like this is what you've got there. I've abandoned using anything above medium on the curvature sliders.
Worth noting also, don't feed DDO PNGs from XNormal. The area outside of UV space is alpha'd which DDO either interprets as black or magic pink which exacerbates any nonsense occuring at the seams. TGAs are fine because they have an actual Alpha channel.


When you try to put your own Curvatures in (I've been using Xnormal) the algorithm seems to just push them darker and darker with each successive blur/relaxation making the entire thing un-useable.

Synaesthesia

1.8 doesn't like alpha channels of any kind, I would avoid using them entirely. 2.0 is slightly more forgiving in this regard but it's still a best practice to remove alpha channels from your input maps before creating a project.

The custom curvature input is broken in 1.8. It's not performing as expected due to the algorithm blowing out the map, which is why anything above medium is generally difficult to work with. 2.0 has solved this issue. We're in the final beta test right now, so look forward to the release soon!

Raane

just for reference when you create curvature bakes with 3do baker will it bake out one then throw it though an algorithm or bake out each of the 7 different ranges to get better fidelity and avoid seam-based shenanigans?

Synaesthesia

From what I can see, it's closer to the latter.