primnull werks
polycounter lvl 5
Edit: i just closed firefox after typing my post before submitting it so i cried for 10 seconds but ok here goes again...
working with xnormal, maya, photoshop, ddo and ndo2 to create a good low poly and textured, normal mapped knife. i have modeled low and high and unwrapped low. Baking the normal in xnormal at the moment but doesn't look so good even after I bumped the "front max ray distance" and "rear max ray distance" both to 50, as suggested on eat3d after I had some problems and that was suggested. There are a lot of options in xnormal, not sure which ones to play with? I read adjusting mesh size in the 3d app, maya, could for some reason, help xnormal find all the little edges and tight places. Might try that next?
here are some pics of what i mentioned above,
part of my highpoly UC DIVE text is showing up in xnormal but it's skewed?? Does how i laid out my uv snapshot effect making normals in xnormal?? Trying to understand how all the programs communicate with each other, you know?
At the moment watching 2 hr video "complete dDo breakdown with Remington chainsaw." It's way beyond my meager goals, but future learning is good and helps me for when I move on to more complicated things. Just trying to get the basics down at the moment. Trying to follow the author on the 3:54 minute mark where he's importing meshes into xnormal.
this is going to be a long-running thread
working with xnormal, maya, photoshop, ddo and ndo2 to create a good low poly and textured, normal mapped knife. i have modeled low and high and unwrapped low. Baking the normal in xnormal at the moment but doesn't look so good even after I bumped the "front max ray distance" and "rear max ray distance" both to 50, as suggested on eat3d after I had some problems and that was suggested. There are a lot of options in xnormal, not sure which ones to play with? I read adjusting mesh size in the 3d app, maya, could for some reason, help xnormal find all the little edges and tight places. Might try that next?
here are some pics of what i mentioned above,
part of my highpoly UC DIVE text is showing up in xnormal but it's skewed?? Does how i laid out my uv snapshot effect making normals in xnormal?? Trying to understand how all the programs communicate with each other, you know?
At the moment watching 2 hr video "complete dDo breakdown with Remington chainsaw." It's way beyond my meager goals, but future learning is good and helps me for when I move on to more complicated things. Just trying to get the basics down at the moment. Trying to follow the author on the 3:54 minute mark where he's importing meshes into xnormal.
this is going to be a long-running thread
Replies
1. Are the normals backwards?
2. Are you using a cage?
3. Are you using the normal maps as bump or normal?
4. Have you made support loops?
5. Does the HP look correct when you smooth it?
Most of these things should be easy enough to understand if you just google them so I wont give you a breakdown of how to do them, but my best guess is that the normals are backwards.
Maxilator brought up the main potential issues, do you understand how smoothing groups on the LP affect the bake? With blades you have to be careful with your cage since the mesh gets really thin.
I think the "complete dDo breakdown with chainsaw" tutorial might not be the most suited to your current needs (a focus on texturing, when I think you need a good tutorial on modeling/baking.) Worry about the bake for now but it looks like your HP might have a few sharp edges. In fact I would go off and do some general bake tests with floaters, 90 degree geometry and the like. Once you can bake a cube with no seams, move on to baking a more complex shape plus floaters, and then come back to the knife. Keep practicing, fill out your knowledge and you'll nail it
Using xnormal for all my baking and only maya's default uv editor to arrange and unfold, sew and flip my uvs. Is that an ok process? Maya's uv editor is pretty limited in my opinion. Plus all my tutorials suggest xnormal. I will post later today changes and here's a shot of my unchanged LP and HP versions no wires,
err something weird happened when i opened my file. The models are flickery?? I didn't know what it was so I applied a new Blinn and copy pasted them to a new scene but still it transferred over. No clue what that is. Thought maybe my HP, where it's the worst, was duplicated and I checked and it wasn't. This is like one bad mistake after another. Thinking of starting from scratch with a new LP and HP.
The high isn't occupying the same space as the low. You want them sitting on top of each other.
I'm not sure what units you are modelling in but my Maya default is cm and these things came in massive.
All I did was recenter the meshes, scale them to a more reasonable size, align the high and low and bake. It worked a lot better. I'll attach the new files so you can have a look.
There are still some issues that are coming from the low not having enough geometry to support the bake.
Maybe one of the other guys can point you to some good info on hard surface modelling as I am a bit of a noob at it.
I'd start here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Subdivision_Surface_Modeling
I will look at the zip in there.
So how can I tell in the future how many polies the LP should have in order to support the HPs normal? Do you know what I mean?
also, someone in the way u working on thread suggested i try tangent space normals instead of bump and things look a little better. But I'm thinking the holes in the lp handle need a few more edges. agree?
but i started something a little simpler than the knife, a high poly box with details, cuts, and wires and then my lower poly version and used xnormal and various export options. Pretty sure my maya uv unwrap is messed up but when i sewed edges they were right next to each other and then i flattened the uvs so they weren't squiggly..
uv set
and now I'm trying to figure out what the padding does. this guy here says it's about limiting distortion in the edges,
so i did a test with padding different levels and i can see the difference comparing the two uvs, attached, but when i applied one padding level uv to BOX 1 it looked good. Applying an elevated level to another box with the other normal map version, I can't see a difference. Am I supposed to be able to see a difference on the normal map? Or is it just something the map does to the object... stretching the normal properly on the object in a specific way?
uv set 2, box on the Left, above
uv set 2, box on the RIGHT, above
Now to bake without seams; the hard and fast rule is, when you get a 90 degree angle, you should split the uv, and for every hard edge, you must have a UV split. HOWEVER, you can still have UV splits on 'soft' or smoothed edges. Again, the wiki will help to clarify things here
Some nice videos;
So to sum up, in order to bake without those seams, you have to first put every face of that cube on a separate smoothing group, and then split each hard edge (in this case all edges) and move each uv island away from each other in the uv map (to create space for the padding). You were getting seams because when padding was applied to your islands, there was no room for more pixels to emerge because your islands were stitched when they shouldn't be, due to the hard edge rule. Make sure you fully understand these rules before you continue with more complicated objects.
Also, mips sound like stages of LOD1, LOD2, etc, or am I getting that wrong?
now the next thing, if you want to show your lowpoly in maya, nothing bakes better for maya than maya itself.
I'll try again with the knife.
I've done baking with maya normals inside of maya itself but it crashes a lot, hence why I use xnormal but i'll try again
thank you so much mr. unger
https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/la/l666u3wktcaa.png
ninja star
http://p3d.in/hGBzq
throwing knife
http://p3d.in/qQEbE
anyway, I don't know if I asked this before but how should I be able to tell of my checker pattern looks dense enough? I mean should I try to fit in one or two checkers inside of one FACE or what? Here's a knife I made and am trying different projection methods to unwrap it, also following a DigitalTutors Maya UV tutorial series
Both cubes are UV'd the exact same, they just have differently tiling materials. What DOES matter however, is the size of the checkers in relation to one another. Looking at your knife, the checkers are bigger on the blade than on the handle, which means the blade will have LESS texel density. You are allocating too much space to the handle in comparison to the blade. Ideally and as a general starting rule, you want the checkers all over your model to be the same size, and to make the UV islands as big inside the UV space as you can (while taking padding into account). Later on, you'll find there are some neat optimisation techniques you can do, e.g. allocating less UV space to faces that aren't seen so often, like on the bottom of props or faces that are mostly facing away from the player. Keep at it
Doing small projects for work on my skills.
Just did a flash hider object
http://p3d.in/vwTvE
But that normal map guide looks good thanks
got my basher axe in ddo and did some work
my AO has some pretty bad lines on it even though I maxed out fill seams option in MentalRay baker. I'm guessing I should fix them by hand in photoshop?