Nvidia Melody problems

TechSmith

I'm having a bit of a problem with Melody. When I try to load a reference model in the 3ds format it crashes. Also is there a zoom extents command? My meshes seem to be bigger than the window. Also what is the default up axis in this program? I've been looking through the documentation and couldn't find any of these answers.

rawkstar

make sure when you export your model is triangulated, melody doesn't like quads. also your highpoly model might be too big (filesize) try to break it up. the axis are all the same as in max as far as I know, I haven't had alot of problems. oh and don't use 3ds, use OBJ files, to keep the UVs when exporting the OBJ files simply set the number of digits to 5 and check all the options that make sense. u do want to rotate and you do want to keep scale to 1.

TechSmith

Thanks Rockstar. Using obj files works fine. I scaled the mesh down and it's visible in the melody viewport now. I now have my first normal map using this app. Next step is to learn how to combine normal maps in photoshop.

KDR_11k

Combining normalmaps:
Open one of them. Copy the other one into a layer above the first and set it to overlay. Use Levels and set the blue channel output for that layer from 0-255 to 0-127. Merge down. Use the NVidia normalmap tools with "normalize only".

TechSmith

Thanks KDR. Sorry I've been slow to respond, I've been a bit under the weather lately.