Answered: What's happening here?

navcrowds

I'm doing my basic block work in blender and creating my uv maps there. From there I'm taking it into zbrush to create my hi res details. I then export colour id maps from zbrush and hi/low poly versions of my mesh parts to take into xnormal for Normal and AO map creation. Then i bring it all into DDO but I'm getting results like the one shown below. Normal maps dont seem to be working correctly and my AO maps seem to be screwed up... I thought xnormal exported things in a DDO happy way ?

Synaesthesia

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that looks like your UVs and/or shading are off.

navcrowds

Hmm I created the uv's in blender using seams where i thought (?) would be logical places. Not sure what you mean by shading?

lichyard

Might be a normals problem, they could be facing the wrong way. In the properties panel (n key) you have a show normals option. Then, if they aren't consistent you can use the "make normals consistent" command from the menu.

navcrowds

I checked normals in Blender and all seemed fine. I usually  ctrl N on most things just to make sure.

navcrowds

it looks like not only are the high poly detail being added to my normal map but the low poly ones also... you can see the low poly mesh!

Synaesthesia

Is this your input normal map? If it is, this is an issue with your model/bakes rather than anything DDO is doing.

navcrowds

indeed it is, i think you're right. i'm gonna have to try to eliminate the exact point where things are going skew. If I skip xnormal and output my maps direct from zbrush they don't appear to contain the traces of the LP model. However they look the same in 3DO !?

Synaesthesia

Probably because your LP model wasn't smoothed properly. Use the new one from ZB or re-process it through Blender. You might need to play with export settings until you find something that works well with 3DO. I can't really advise much here as I'm not familiar with Blender at all.

navcrowds

I think you may be right, tweaking it now and giving it a try.