I have a question about baking vertex color. I will explain my process. I am using Faogen to bake the vertex color onto a high rez model. I export from Faogen (after I get the vertex AO bake) as an obj and import that into Xnormal. From there I make sure I uncheck Ignore per- vertex color under the high poly options in Xnormal and try to bake highpoly vertex color to a texture to a low poly model that is uv'd. It is a no go. Any one able to get this to work or know what I am doing wrong? One thing I do notice is that when exporting the obj from Faogen, I do not see a .mtl file associated with it. Should I be seeing one?
There are a few ways of storing vertex colour data in obj format. If you export a an obj from maya with vert colours it would show up in xNormal, whereas a mesh with polypaint directly from zbrush will work.
So I'm not sure if xNormal supports the way Faogen encodes vertex data.
just wondering if anyone's had an issue, where exporting both a mesh and a cage as .obj from 3ds max has xNormal throwing up an error that their vertex counts do not match?
it works if i export as .3ds, but then there are some annoying seam issues due to 3ds splitting along verts uvw seams.
I don't use max, but I have heard of it's default obj exprter causing issues for some (missing faces, detached verts, wrong smoothing etc...). I remember an alternative obj exporter being recommended, but xNormal supports the fbx format better now, so maybe that's an option.
yeah. I am not sure how Faogen exports the vert color either. I have definitively baked vert color from polypaint no problem at all before in Xnormal, so I am almost sure that both xnormal and maya are unable to read what Faogen exports. If anyone has experience with this I would love to know how this works with Faogen exports. Thanks!
Can't seem to load an fbx from Blender. Says memory is protected when trying to bake.
Using the latest build from the xN site. Before updating today, this sort of fbx worked...
Otherwise, happy new year for xNormal, hope eveything is going well.
Has anyone managed to fix this? Would be great to know how to make it work. :poly142:
I view in 3ds max (with Y changed to ' - '). Does it mean I will never get good results with max ?
So the side is a separate UV island AND a different smoothing group? That should render out fine. I've done it before with far less of a seam than you have there. It looks like there may not be much padding on the UV islands?
Yeah different smoothing groups for different uv islands. In xNormal I use about 8 pixels of padding. I thought it may be issue casued by something that oXYnary is talking about here :
just wondering if anyone's had an issue, where exporting both a mesh and a cage as .obj from 3ds max has xNormal throwing up an error that their vertex counts do not match?
it works if i export as .3ds, but then there are some annoying seam issues due to 3ds splitting along verts uvw seams.
Which version of xNormal are you using? Make sure that "Shortest Diagonal" is unchecked in the Plugins> Default Triangulator. Also, It can help if you pre-triangulate the mesh before export (save memory in xN too )
Yeah different smoothing groups for different uv islands. In xNormal I use about 8 pixels of padding. I thought it may be issue casued by something that oXYnary is talking about here :
Thx for trying to help ;p I thought my post was left for dead ;p
Yea, Joshua is correct...This should bake without any major issue. For the padding, 8px might be ok, but it really depends on the texture size you are using. I usually use 8px per 1k of map (so 2k would be 16).
Can you post the normal map, UV's and the objects (obj/fbx please) that you are trying to bake?...I would be happy to try and bake them here to see if I can find out what the issue is
Here you go. I hope I exported those right. Since I deleted example from which I made those screenshots I had to prepare this model again. It should give the same result. Thanks for trying to help.
Sounds like a bug in the Blender export. Might be worth reporting it in the Blender bug tracker.
I think the error come in with an xnormal update but haven't tracked it down as I don't want pre Normal 3.17.7 without the "- The FBX mesh importer has been completely rewritten. Now it can load the tangent basis from the files which is specially good if you use the Unity engine."
FWIW I did have it working at one point ages ago with blender 2.49.
Here you go. I hope I exported those right. Since I deleted example from which I made those screenshots I had to prepare this model again. It should give the same result. Thanks for trying to help.
Ok! I baked the new normal map and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary when everything was viewed in Marmoset.
I imported the meshes into Blender so that I could make a cage and then set the UV islands borders to sharp (smoothing groups), exported into xNormal and baked with 16px edge padding.
There are a few sharp edges that show up when you are really close, but nothing that I wouldn't expect when the camera is zoomed in to such an extent and when the tangent basis of applications don't match.
Hey guys, I'm getting some weird artifacts when baking. This image sums it up pretty well, although in reverse order. You can see on the left what the model with the normal looks like, the middle of the normal map itself, and the right is the low-poly and high-poly with the cage clearly covering it.
EDIT: Okay it was the smoothing groups affecting the bake.
does anybody have any good AO settings for characters? i keep getting washed out, undetailed AO's and no matter how i change the settings, it only gets more washed out or stays the same. im so confused??? and also, do you have to have a floor plane whenever you are using a cage?
Having an odd problem with xNormal not baking the correct high-poly geo.
On the left I've got the xNormal view with some low-poly geo's cage covering the high-poly (ignore the stuff above it, there's no low for that yet). But the bake in the middle is clearly baking some random stuff from above... the bake on the right is how it's baked within Max.
I've tried collapsing everything and resetting the xForms of everything, I've exported everything via different methods (using the plugin, objs for everything, including cages) and even baked without using a cage.
I have been having problems with bleeding around my uv islands and came across xnormal dilation filter as a potential solution. I have done a test texture but am unsure whether the result I am seeing is normal/ desired.
Below is the image.
At number 1 is what I was expecting to happen with the dilation effect extending the solid colour by the desired pixel amount. At 2 however the dilation effect isn't really close to the original sample; I can't see the effect solving my problems in those areas.
Nope, you're right, that shouldn't be happening, which version of XN do you have?
OK, just tested with the pre-latest release, and it seems like the plugin has an issue, bummer, will check the latest version and go hunting for the old version and see which one works.
Is it possible to use the xNormal 3D viewer to view a height map, I tried loading the height map on to my low poly model, but it doesn't show up. Am I missing something, I would just do this in Maya, but the height map looks banded in the high quality viewport mode.
hi guys I have some weird artifacts on my model:
I made this in softimage and xnormal. Changing geo approximatin don't solve it.
Can you tell my what it is? (I hope it's correct place for this question )
Double checked your low poly mesh?
Might be doubled polies or unwelded verts. Throw a turbosmooth on the low and check if its clean.
If it is clean, play with the "maximum ray distance" settings.
It's something wrong with exporting from Softimage...
I imported this model into Modo, removed vertex normals then applied material with 180 smoothing and it looks good now
hello... baking vertex AO with Xnormal...damn its fast.... but it always softens the normals(normalising them) wich i dont want... anyway around this...
Hey all, I am having a problem with my normal map that is getting baked out of xnormal. The one out of maya is coming out perfect but baking out of maya is very difficult as it doesn't handle zbrush files very well.
Show the vertex normals on your low-poly inside maya. Are they locked in a strange way/direction ?
Have you tried the average normal of xNormal during the baking ?
Hi Dave, I don't think it was anything to do with xNormal the low poly model appeared to be corrupt in some way. It bakes fine out of xNormal now. I combined it with a cube and it went all crazy in Maya and lost it's material assignment so I deleted history and then reapplied the lambert1 shader and reexported the .obj, works fine now. I also triangulated the mesh and remapped the uv's, I doubt either of those things helped though.
Wait I take it back, the model seems to be fine. I think I've figured it out for real this time though.
1. The mesh needs to be triangulated first before going to xNormal, the triangulated mesh then needs to be used to render correctly in the Maya viewport.
2. There appears to be a bug in viewport 2.0 where the normal map displays incorrectly sometimes, restarting Maya often fixed some weird shading that was appearing.
Is there any chance for max 2013 compatible version ?
3.17.10 available.
- Fixed some crashes in the FBX mesh importer.
- Added 3dsmax/Maya 2013 support.
- Added preliminary support for Photoshop CS6.
- Fixed a problem that was avoiding the OpenCTM mesh importer plug-in to load properly.
- Fixed a memory leak releasing shaders in the OpenGL graphics driver.
- Solved a problem with Growl ( GNTP-send ) which was causing some crashes.
- Fixed a problem with color dialogs in the OpenGL graphics driver.
- Now you can use derivative maps in the 3D viewport ( with parallax effect based on Morten Mikkelsen's blog entry )
- Optimized the de-indexing phase for all the graphics drivers.
- Optimized the DX9 graphics driver and dropped support for ps1/2.
- Recompiled using the latest libraries ( Crosswalk 2012.5, FBXSDK 2012.2, Ogre3D 1.7.4 ).
Have a model where half of it is unwrapped, duplicated flipped and combined/verts merged and uv's offset by -1. I am getting a seam with an xnormal bake but not with maya, is there anyway to get xnormal baking without the seam like maya's bake?
I've reproduced the error with a simple beveled cube and provided a download with the obj's I used, a maya file from which they were exported and the two bakes I have. Have tried many things such as triangulating the mesh, using a cage in xnormal, etc but no luck.
Did u try viewing it in xNormals viewer? Also which version of xNormal are you using? The errors on the side look exactly like the software used to view it isn't using the same quad triangulation as the baker did.
It's a funny thing really. Everyone knows that quad triangulation heavily affects gouraud shading but since tangent space is a hidden vertex attribute no one considers that the same thing is true for the interpolated tangent space.
I did say that I had tried triangulating the low for baking, but it didn't change the results. It looks the same in xNormals viewer, can download the files and try it yourself. The seam is where the mesh is mirrored.
For version, I used 3.17.5 initially then updated to 3.17.13.
Have a model where half of it is unwrapped, duplicated flipped and combined/verts merged and uv's offset by -1. I am getting a seam with an xnormal bake but not with maya, is there anyway to get xnormal baking without the seam like maya's bake?
I've reproduced the error with a simple beveled cube and provided a download with the obj's I used, a maya file from which they were exported and the two bakes I have. Have tried many things such as triangulating the mesh, using a cage in xnormal, etc but no luck.
Everything baked and displayed fine for me in xNormal 3.17.13.
I loaded the objs, made a cage in the 3d viewer and then baked. Not really sure why it's going wrong for you
For my cage I loaded the low obj as its cage. In Maya the envelope was exactly the same as the low so figured that might have worked.
Did you still get the seam in xNormal viewer with the xNormal bake I included? I'm wondering what I am doing wrong, I haven't made a cage in the 3D viewer before.
Replies
Thanks for any help!
So I'm not sure if xNormal supports the way Faogen encodes vertex data.
I don't use max, but I have heard of it's default obj exprter causing issues for some (missing faces, detached verts, wrong smoothing etc...). I remember an alternative obj exporter being recommended, but xNormal supports the fbx format better now, so maybe that's an option.
Has anyone managed to fix this? Would be great to know how to make it work. :poly142:
So the side is a separate UV island AND a different smoothing group? That should render out fine. I've done it before with far less of a seam than you have there. It looks like there may not be much padding on the UV islands?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1169198&postcount=1984
Since you got better results maybe its not that.
Thx for trying to help ;p I thought my post was left for dead ;p
Sounds like a bug in the Blender export. Might be worth reporting it in the Blender bug tracker.
Yea, Joshua is correct...This should bake without any major issue. For the padding, 8px might be ok, but it really depends on the texture size you are using. I usually use 8px per 1k of map (so 2k would be 16).
Can you post the normal map, UV's and the objects (obj/fbx please) that you are trying to bake?...I would be happy to try and bake them here to see if I can find out what the issue is
Here you go. I hope I exported those right. Since I deleted example from which I made those screenshots I had to prepare this model again. It should give the same result. Thanks for trying to help.
I think the error come in with an xnormal update but haven't tracked it down as I don't want pre Normal 3.17.7 without the "- The FBX mesh importer has been completely rewritten. Now it can load the tangent basis from the files which is specially good if you use the Unity engine."
FWIW I did have it working at one point ages ago with blender 2.49.
I imported the meshes into Blender so that I could make a cage and then set the UV islands borders to sharp (smoothing groups), exported into xNormal and baked with 16px edge padding.
There are a few sharp edges that show up when you are really close, but nothing that I wouldn't expect when the camera is zoomed in to such an extent and when the tangent basis of applications don't match.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2057427/Polycount/thomp.zip
Hope that helps
@Frankie, Ahh ok. Might be worth me running a few tests later... I will keep my eye open for the error.
Really like this tool, so would be nice to hear something more about the next version.
We had to completely rewrite the UI system from wxWidgets to Qt so we got a small delay but we'll post an update soon
This is the first time I use xNormal in Windows 7 (32bit).
I get this problem signature: It does not save my settings after the crash as it usually did in XP when it crashed there.
I am using the latest xnormal version.
Any ideas? Thanks
Will a Max-like "Match Material ID" baking option will be included?
Looking forward to more updates, this is a great tool.
http://colinbarrebrisebois.com/category/subsurface-scattering/
I cant figure out how to do it in Xnormal, and so far the only program that i know that can do it is max.
xNormal can render out a thickness map which is exactly that as far as i can tell.
EDIT: Okay it was the smoothing groups affecting the bake.
On the left I've got the xNormal view with some low-poly geo's cage covering the high-poly (ignore the stuff above it, there's no low for that yet). But the bake in the middle is clearly baking some random stuff from above... the bake on the right is how it's baked within Max.
I've tried collapsing everything and resetting the xForms of everything, I've exported everything via different methods (using the plugin, objs for everything, including cages) and even baked without using a cage.
I'm lost for ideas!
Below is the image.
http://flic.kr/p/bsbPJN (sorry about the link, my images aren't embedding)
At number 1 is what I was expecting to happen with the dilation effect extending the solid colour by the desired pixel amount. At 2 however the dilation effect isn't really close to the original sample; I can't see the effect solving my problems in those areas.
OK, just tested with the pre-latest release, and it seems like the plugin has an issue, bummer, will check the latest version and go hunting for the old version and see which one works.
The height map texture slot can be only used in combination with a normal map in order to produce parallax normal mapping. You cannot use it alone.
I made this in softimage and xnormal. Changing geo approximatin don't solve it.
Can you tell my what it is? (I hope it's correct place for this question
Might be doubled polies or unwelded verts. Throw a turbosmooth on the low and check if its clean.
If it is clean, play with the "maximum ray distance" settings.
I imported this model into Modo, removed vertex normals then applied material with 180 smoothing and it looks good now
Can anyone explain what is going on here?
thx!
Have you tried the average normal of xNormal during the baking ?
OBJs
http://www.dizzydish.com/concretepillar.rar
1. The mesh needs to be triangulated first before going to xNormal, the triangulated mesh then needs to be used to render correctly in the Maya viewport.
2. There appears to be a bug in viewport 2.0 where the normal map displays incorrectly sometimes, restarting Maya often fixed some weird shading that was appearing.
- Fixed some crashes in the FBX mesh importer.
- Added 3dsmax/Maya 2013 support.
- Added preliminary support for Photoshop CS6.
- Fixed a problem that was avoiding the OpenCTM mesh importer plug-in to load properly.
- Fixed a memory leak releasing shaders in the OpenGL graphics driver.
- Solved a problem with Growl ( GNTP-send ) which was causing some crashes.
- Fixed a problem with color dialogs in the OpenGL graphics driver.
- Now you can use derivative maps in the 3D viewport ( with parallax effect based on Morten Mikkelsen's blog entry )
- Optimized the de-indexing phase for all the graphics drivers.
- Optimized the DX9 graphics driver and dropped support for ps1/2.
- Recompiled using the latest libraries ( Crosswalk 2012.5, FBXSDK 2012.2, Ogre3D 1.7.4 ).
thanks for the new version
I've reproduced the error with a simple beveled cube and provided a download with the obj's I used, a maya file from which they were exported and the two bakes I have. Have tried many things such as triangulating the mesh, using a cage in xnormal, etc but no luck.
Files:
http://www.2shared.com/file/TziADikh/bakingError_xNormal.html
It's a funny thing really. Everyone knows that quad triangulation heavily affects gouraud shading but since tangent space is a hidden vertex attribute no one considers that the same thing is true for the interpolated tangent space.
For version, I used 3.17.5 initially then updated to 3.17.13.
Everything baked and displayed fine for me in xNormal 3.17.13.
I loaded the objs, made a cage in the 3d viewer and then baked. Not really sure why it's going wrong for you
Did you still get the seam in xNormal viewer with the xNormal bake I included? I'm wondering what I am doing wrong, I haven't made a cage in the 3D viewer before.