i hat yo normal maping

CheapAlert

nvidia melody + fb objs =



suck

what's going on, and no i have no flipped normals, everything looks aight. exporting from blender to obj imported into melody.

i'm really trying melody because d3/q4's rnederbump can't even fucking recognize the material in the .ase file. just gives me _emptyname instead and fails.

lkraan

Try ORB to generate the normal maps. I can read ASE and it's super easy to use.

The generated normal maps are Doom3/Q4 compatible.

http://engineering.soclab.bth.se/tools/177.aspx

KDR_11k

Doom 3 gives better results than ORB, seams are less obvious and stuff like that.

Try exporting the lowpoly as .lwo, not .ase.

ElysiumGX

I spent some time learning melody today. had some problems. then i updated to the latest version. had more problems. test with several files. verdict: Melody sucks. I'd take KDR's advice. Blender can't create normal maps?

robby_lamb

Some your artifacts look like they could be coming from overlapping geometry. For instace, where the chin hangs over the chest. The rays may be having trouble finding the geometry underneath causing artifacts.

MoP

Yeah, what robby_lamb says seems to be the case. Is your model scaled really small?
Try reducing the ray cast distance, it should fix it.

KDR_11k

Blender works in scales of 2-10 units for the entire model, I suppose a program meant for other scales would consider that tiny... But Doom 3 and ORB determine the casting distance from the face area. Maybe Melody just sucks...

CheapAlert

yeah if q4 would properly detect and interpret the material name/path properly in my exported .ase file i'd use it

MoP

So did you try ORB?
And did you try reducing the raycast distance in Melody?

CheapAlert

the raycast distance in melody only fixed some of the tiny spots. that big ugly "shadow" under his neck is still a bugger

I had a friend try ORB with the same model, does still have ugly artifacts like the one above but has a big blazing seam right in the middle. (Yes it's mirrored)

KDR_11k

Cheap: Then rename the material in your mtr file to match the name the ASE reports. That's what I did, except I used LWO to get my data ready for the renderbump.

CheapAlert

that doesn't work. The ASE can have any material name it's assigned, Q4 just keeps returning _emptyname instead.

KDR_11k

Then use LWO.

kat

What's wrong with those ORB renders I sent you the other day?

I'm not sure what sort of quality you're expecting to achieve here but those ones I sent are about as good as you're going to get without rendering a massive 1024+ textures, certainly a lot better quality than the ones you're currently getting. Those minor artifacts you saw on the ears were typical because of the amount of highpoly data Vs the number of available pixels to render to; they can be easily cleared up in photoshop (et al).

CheapAlert

kat - you didn't send me anything yet

kdr - somehow the file does indeed exist, but the lwo just completely fails loading.

kat

Yeah I did
[ QUOTE ]
19/01/2006 01:51:10 Transfer of "fb_textures.zip" is complete.

[/ QUOTE ]That's from my MSN history. You made some comments about the ears looking a bit dodgy and I told you that was becasue of the amount pixel space available Vs the highpoly detail for that area.

Anyway if you want them I'll send them to you again if need be. There are a couple of areas you could touch up in photoshop but to be honest you ain't really gonna get uber high quality results on a 512x512. The following is based on the two ASE models you sent me via MSN - unless you've forgotton about that as well ;o) - render out in ORB as 512x512.

[image]image woz 'ere[/image]

KDR_11k

Seriously, I'd use Doom 3/Quake 4 for rendering the normalmaps, ORB creates much more obvious seams and it's limited to screen resolution.

I'm not too sure how I made those LWOs though the header says "Lightwave Export Script for Blender 2.36 by Anthony D'Agostino http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/scorpius". What kind of error do you get?

Maybe Quake 4 messed something up, I used Doom 3.

kat

I can only speak from personal experience editing and creating content for the Doom 3 engine; I've never had any problems with normalmaps rendered in ORB (can't speak for others), and that's after some extensive testing using ORB, Melody and Doom 3, to see what the difference was. The end result was no matter what you used they *all* produce normalsmaps with idiosyncratic problems relative to each tool.

CheapAlert

However, d3/q4's renderbump is more suitable for models with mirrored UVs such as mine.

kat

Fair enough. You know where I am.

KDR_11k

kat: I have compared results and the Doom 3 result was superior to the ORB result.

kat

Look, I simply mentioned ORB as an alternative route to solve the problems CheapAlert was having. I'm not interested in comparing penis size but trying to get Cheapy sorted out with a working normalmap he can use in game. If D3 is creating problems then you fall back on something else until you get it resolved, working on both at the same time to try and figure out what's going wrong.

My mentioning the testing is just so you know the comments aren't comming from some 'armchair modder' and are backed up with practicle knowledge, take that as you will, I don't care any more.