[xNormal] [Solved] Issues with Exported vs Average normals (xnormal bug)

dsruak

Hiya! Long time stalker, trying to be less 'forum shy'. I'm having some issues on a personal piece that's long time coming and I finally think I'm really close to calling it done and sharing it. However being a personal piece and an experiment on polishing my workflow I'm being overly nitpicky on the process. For the most part on older pieces Average Normals has been working fine, mostly on work stuff that needed quick turnaround I would end up fixing errors in photoshop.
Here's the deal, trying to nail the belt thingy with the pouches. Scupt is  zbrush, retopo 3ds max, baking on xnormal (duh!) 2.19.3. Files are fbx.

I'm having issues using xNormal's 'use exported normals' setting. Seems like the 'depth' of the normals is not right. As if there was a linear to gamma conversion of something like that. Not really, but the effect feels like that. I'd like to hear your thoughts on what am I doing wrong here or if i'm actually trying to do something not possible.

Thanks!
-d
 (Any advice on sharing pics as a thumbnail instead of full pics is highly appreciated.)

dsruak

SOLVED! it's a bug on xnormal, can't find any references on the web. The red channel it's being clamped when using 'use exported normals'. I can open the image on photoshop and adjust the levels of the red channel and it looks as intended. Had to export as 32bpp because it was really flat. Really late here so tomorrow i'll check if I can repro on older versions of xnormal.