Qualifying your normals

r13

Have you ever had your normal maps just refused to behave no matter what you did? Alec Moody may have a workflow that can fix that.

He has posted a tutorial/explanation at 3D Motive on how to work with explicit or qualified normals when you are working with the UDK as the target and MAX as the weapon of choice. It might not fix your particular issue, but you would do well to absorb this information as it will probably affect you at some point.

Xoliul

Damn, I was hoping there'd be a fix for Skeletal meshes
Nonetheless, cool to see it written down so thoroughly!

Racer445

Oniram

SUPERB!

Cordell Felix

awesome, tested it out already!
I was really suprised!
Thank you!

passerby

is there a equilvenat for maya 2012.

in maya`s fbx export options i got the same export Tangets and Binormals option but im not sure if there is a way to enable qualified mode.

AlecMoody

So qualified mode on its own is unrelated to unreal. The reason you need to enable it in max is that the exporter uses whatever tangents are being displayed and in max pre-hotfix 4 the viewport tangent basis didn't match what the render to texture was using. With this workflow you are just packaging the tangents into the model file and the reason you need to use qualified mode is so that you are packaging the correct (matching render to texture) tangent basis. Maya has never this mismatch so you don't need to do anything other than include binormals and tangents in your export and then import with the explicit normals button checked.

passerby

ah thanks Alec.

would baking with xnormal and exporting out of maya with this method cause a mismatch right.

Mio

awesome share.! Alec

but when i try to bake a box to test(in max 2012), i can't reach the same looking as the "Qualified Normals Test" file .

the one offered in the tutorial looks awesome(1 smooth group, uv stitched...) anyone could tell me why....

AlecMoody

passerby- baking out of maya and using explicit normals should see an improvment. Xnormal won't since when you do the export it will grab the maya/max tangents.


Mio- your object up on 3dmotive and I will take a look.

AlecMoody

*post your object on 3dmotive

Harbinger

Using explicit normals works with meshes coming out of Maya as well. I bake normals in Maya (AO in Xnormal) with all UV island edges hard, export as .FBX, then import into Unreal with explicit normals, and I get clean results.

passerby

thanks this article made me look into the normal basis a bit more between apps and i can actually use this workflow with xnormal and maya, xnormal comes with a SBM exporter for maya that lets me included maya view-port tangent basis with the model for baking, so i can just use that to export to xnormal and when everything is all baked and done i just need to use the options mentioned in this article when exporting fbx to udk.

Joshua Stubbles

This worked flawlessly with my model. It had some major wonkiness displaying in UDK but after exporting the new mesh with those settings it looks perfect. Thanks for the write-up, it's much appreciated.

reiro

Worked fine. Good job.

botchiball

This link is broken.

Xeros

Link is still broken.

AlecMoody

It looks like 3dmotive has reorganized and in the process lost their old news posts. Here is a version of that article hosted at my site:
http://www.alecmoody.com/unreal_normals/

This workflow is partially outdated now- Looks up the imported tangents workflow added to the july 2012 UDK build or check out handplane.