I'm playing with the basics and it's hard to know if what is shown is a bug somewhere or an odd technical manifestation of some kind.
In order to enable hosting, it was necessary to convert the file to jpeg, but the visual artifacts were not altered visually in any significant way.
My scene is a simple flat plane, with a rotate cube above it. I would expect the normal map to show a perfectly straight line in between both faces, but instead it seems to round near the corners, and there is a slight depression on the pink side in its center.
Does you high-poly have a plane too behind the cube ?
I think what you here is just the edge padding, since the is void around your cube, xNormal fill it by expanding the last pixels of the cube to avoid mip-mapping errors.
Add a plane, this way xNormal will not see any void and will fill it correctly.
Does you high-poly have a plane too behind the cube ?
I think what you here is just the edge padding, since the is void around your cube, xNormal fill it by expanding the last pixels of the cube to avoid mip-mapping errors.
Add a plane, this way xNormal will not see any void and will fill it correctly.
Hi. Thanks for your response. I do have a plane behind the cube, which is why I share the same intuition as you and consider this unusual.
Can anyone tell me what these different maps are use for?
I've found videos with different workflows, but nothing that covers ALL the maps xnormal can create (most are just normal map and AO based).
I'm already familiar with the three ticked/checked.
Can anyone tell me what these different maps are use for?
I've found videos with different workflows, but nothing that covers ALL the maps xnormal can create (most are just normal map and AO based).
I'm already familiar with the three ticked/checked.
curvature, bake concave data to the red channel and convex to the green channel its good for dirt accumulation masks, and worn edges.
bake base texture does what it sounds bakes the texture from the highpoly to the low poly
height bakes greyscale map with displacement information.
radiosity normal map, is a special normal map valve uses with some self shadowing information built in.
bake highpoly vertex colors, does what it sounds like (good for bakeing polyPaint from zbrush)
Thickness is greyscale data displaying the thickness of a mesh. (usefull for sub surface scattering shaders)
So I resolved the problems using Xnormal's cage in the 3D viewer option. Also tweaked around some other parameters and am now getting close to perfect bakes with Xnormal. But I had some issues that made me a bit confused so please help me if you can guys.
OK so firstly I tried loading the 3D viewer with both high poly and a low poly mesh, but the viewer refused to open up showing an error that the mesh has too many triangles that exceed the limit that Xnormal can handle.
So in order to resolve this issue I exported out a slightly low res mesh from Zbrush and the viewer loaded this time. I built the cage and saved the meshes (.sbm files). So what exactly are these sbm files??
Also then I replaced the "slightly low res mesh" in the high poly mesh section of Xnormal with the original High poly mesh and it didn't bake out good normals. They were crap actually.
So to resolve this now, I used the low poly .sbm file as an external cage for the low poly mesh and it worked. I had perfect bakes.
But I don't know exactly why did that work out. Is the lowPoly.sbm file actually the cage mesh file??? I hope you are getting what I'm trying to explain!!
When you were using xnormals cage files- Did you load the ovb file as your lowpoly and click the "use cage" button? Do not attempt to select another cage mesh after doing so as the ovb contains both the cage mesh and the lowpoly.
I use xnormal made cages frequently and haven't run into any problems.
When you were using xnormals cage files- Did you load the ovb file as your lowpoly and click the "use cage" button? Do not attempt to select another cage mesh after doing so as the ovb contains both the cage mesh and the lowpoly.
I use xnormal made cages frequently and haven't run into any problems.
I just dont get the whole idea.. what where obv??? i used the sbm low poly file as an external cage and it worked. How?? I dont know!!@#
check for flipped normals on your meshes. if you are baking with a cage make sure that the whole high poly mesh is "inside" the cage. if you are baking without a cage, try to adjust the ray distances
I have a character model that conssts of like 20 seperate pieces ( armour, skirt, hair etc) I have both the low and high poly versions listed correctly in each tabs.
When I render it XNormal behaves as if these 20 seperate meseher are al in the same scene and theier cages are intersect. get terrible maps.
I just started getting an error "ios_base:failbit set" in xNormal. It seems to bake normals for a while and then that pops up. It's a pretty hefty amount of tris but it was working before, all I did was tighten up the cage some. Any ideas?
Hi. Anyone got a fix for Xnormal crashing when converting Tangent to OS?
Thanks
Yeah, just wait until xNormal is done baking everything and you should be good. You could bake your normalmaps separately from the other maps and you'll be able to use handplane at the same time as you bake the other maps.
Has anyone else had issues with the OpenRL renderer giving completely different results from the default bucket renderer or completely failing to render AO or Normal Maps?
tonyd927, I'll show a more detailed message for the next version.
DougClayton4231 The CUDA and OpenRL sacrifice some accuracy for performance, so it's possible that you could get sightly different results compared with the default renderer. Also, GPUs don't have much VRAM, memory for GPGPU usually is limited to 50% and some cards ( unlike pro Quadro/Tesla ) usually cannot virtualize the memory.
I don't know how long this has been the case. Last version I really used was 3.17 something. I used to be able to export from 3D Max a projected cage sbm file that had a modifier stack. As long as the bottom of it was an editable mesh. Now if I add anything to the stack, even a uvw, it wont allow the projection to export.
Hello everyone. I'm baking my AO for my character, it renders the high poly ao where I want it to be black. I have shoulder armor covering a piece of my character's arm. I want it to occlude the arm part, but instead it's baking the surface ao for the shoulder piece directly onto the arm. You can see it in the top left of this AO bake. What should I do to get occlusion rather than it baking onto the arm?
One more question. I've been rendering normal maps for armor pieces that have smooth edges. My bakes are fine until they change direction suddenly (180 degrees), and I think the reason for the bad bakes on the sharp turns is because my low-poly geo isn't enough to capture the high poly. Creating cages helps but doesn't make it perfect. Do you guys add more geometry to support sharp turns? I want to hear how other people approaching baking normal maps for thinner objects with sharp turns like armor. Thanks so much!
Can anyone help me out with a wierd edge issue I am having within Xnormal? I recently upgraded to 3.18.4 and in this picture is a high poly model from Zbrush. You can see a wierd kind of zig zag effect on the edges that is translating to the Ambient Occlusion bake.
I have tried;
- Straight export from Zbrush into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as SBM into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as FBX into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as OBJ into Xnormal
- Opening the OBJ as exported from Zbrush in Maya and Exporting as FBX and SBM
All of these still give the same effect when viewed in Xnormal. I can't see anything in Zbrush that should be causing it and in Maya it looks fine too.
I have a GTX460 with the latest ( 331.58 ) drivers. Making maps with the Optix renderer is excruciatingly slow and often causes the computer to hang. The maps eventually bake but good god it takes forever. A 2k normal map took ten minutes.
Also, openRL renderer makes my entire AO map go black if I load more than one mesh into the high-res section. Works fine as long as there's only one mesh in there.
Anyway, Santy, a million thanks for Xnormal and you are a god among insects, etc.
Hi,
Do you guys think that baking from a Decimated model can affect the Normals of a NM map in an undesired way or it shouldn't change anything at all?
xNormal (v3.18.4.37652) never respond after pressing the Generate Maps button but not crashes or hangs.
Hi, there.
I'm baking a normal map and a texture map from a high poly model with vertex color(polypaint).
When I press the Generate Maps button, xNormal seems working but after "Counting lowpoly Default's triangles across the screen..." is shown in the status bar, it never respond. I waited for 6 hours to complete the calculation but it still doesn't end.
The weird thing is the green/red indicator is working properly so it guess xNormal wasn't halted.
I used 3d viewer to check I can see those low and high poly models then It worked. Both models were shown in 3d viewer.
hm...I don't know what is wrong. does anybody get the same problem ??
I've uploaded them to DropBox. If anybody has a spare time, plz plz plz check them out.
xNormal (v3.18.4.37652) never respond after pressing the Generate Maps button but not crashes or hangs.
Hi, there.
I'm baking a normal map and a texture map from a high poly model with vertex color(polypaint).
When I press the Generate Maps button, xNormal seems working but after "Counting lowpoly Default's triangles across the screen..." is shown in the status bar, it never respond. I waited for 6 hours to complete the calculation but it still doesn't end.
The weird thing is the green/red indicator is working properly so it guess xNormal wasn't halted.
I used 3d viewer to check I can see those low and high poly models then It worked. Both models were shown in 3d viewer.
hm...I don't know what is wrong. does anybody get the same problem ??
Thanks in advance.
When I tried your files, I got the same issue, but when I imported your low poly into Maya the UVs were kind of screwed up (also all the normal were hard). Once I assigned some UVs and smoothed the normals it baked fine.
PS: I would recommend that you make a proper low poly, if this is just a test bake, then never mind.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem like this? I'm getting some strange banding issues with a xNormal (left) bake in Unity. On the other hand, 3dsMAX (right) one looks OK.
How do people deal with floating geometry when baking with xNormal? Baking normalmaps is no problem of course, but how do you solve the shadows behind the floaters when you bake AO or cavity? I usually try to stay away from floaters but the few times I've used them I've had to bake two sets of textures (one set with floaters and one without) and then mask away the shadows (I bake a color mask so this is easy). It takes a great lot of time to bake 2 sets and it's a little tedious to have to deal with, so therefore I'm wondering if there is a better way?
How do people deal with floating geometry when baking with xNormal? Baking normalmaps is no problem of course, but how do you solve the shadows behind the floaters when you bake AO or cavity? I usually try to stay away from floaters but the few times I've used them I've had to bake two sets of textures (one set with floaters and one without) and then mask away the shadows (I bake a color mask so this is easy). It takes a great lot of time to bake 2 sets and it's a little tedious to have to deal with, so therefore I'm wondering if there is a better way?
For AO (not sure if it works with cavity and others) on the baking options check the "discard backface hits" box on the upper left.
I'm running into some problems when using Xnormal for next gen engine content creation! I've always used xnormal and love it, which is why I'm sorta baffled by what I'm running into.
The problem is that the precision and tech developed for the new engine shows all sorts of problems with pretty much every 3d apps current gen process of generating normal maps.
Every little imperfection that looked fine in previous engines shows up clear and ugly. Normally In any situation where I run into problems I turn to Xnormal to save the day, but in this case I can't find any way to get rid of the artifacts when baking in Xnormal! (Maya seems to do a slightly better job but still not entirely ideal.)
In the past I've been able to use workarounds using photoshop to bypass some of these issues but as I am required to bake all normal maps to 32 bit per channel .exr files to give to the programmers for processing, a lot of the tools in photoshop stop working entirely.
I'm seeing a lot of artifacts around the edges of uv charts but also where high poly meshes overlap each other. Just like what can be seen here in the polycount (image below taken from PC wiki)normal map wiki page:
I can't render at a higher resolution and down sample because photoshop's down rezing algorithms that provide the nicest results do not work on 32 bit per channel images (bilinear or nearest neighbor actually make the problem worse! and they're the only two available on 32bpc images)
so I have to rely entirely on xnormal to get rid of these kinds of artifacts. I've cranked the AA upto 4x but I'm still getting some nasty edges where ever the high-poly overlaps itself.
As for the uv chart edge artifacts, the programmers are telling me it looks like a precision issue of centriod sampling in a texel. "The center of a texel on the edge of a uv chart is technically on the other side of the mesh so when you shoot a ray it hits the other part of the mesh that's not associated with it."
This problem is particularly annoying because it's causing issues when it's mipped/filtered. The uv chart edge artifacts (which get dragged into the padding aswell) are actually showing up on the mesh!
Any ideas on how to fix some of this stuff would be greatly appreciated!
DamjanMX, use a 16 bits output format like TIFF. You can ebale 16 bits using the plug-in manager, selecting the exporter and pressing "configure".
artquest, Perhaps you could dettach the X bandana from body and render separately.... or explode the model.
Self-AO will be ok but the shadow the bandana drops on the body probably will need to be composited in Photoshop 8(.
xn4 will include some improvements to that but xn3 is a bit limited in this aspect.
Replies
I'm playing with the basics and it's hard to know if what is shown is a bug somewhere or an odd technical manifestation of some kind.
In order to enable hosting, it was necessary to convert the file to jpeg, but the visual artifacts were not altered visually in any significant way.
My scene is a simple flat plane, with a rotate cube above it. I would expect the normal map to show a perfectly straight line in between both faces, but instead it seems to round near the corners, and there is a slight depression on the pink side in its center.
Is this expected?
I think what you here is just the edge padding, since the is void around your cube, xNormal fill it by expanding the last pixels of the cube to avoid mip-mapping errors.
Add a plane, this way xNormal will not see any void and will fill it correctly.
Hi. Thanks for your response. I do have a plane behind the cube, which is why I share the same intuition as you and consider this unusual.
I've found videos with different workflows, but nothing that covers ALL the maps xnormal can create (most are just normal map and AO based).
I'm already familiar with the three ticked/checked.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v162/daisukexdark/CyberGirl_Normals1_zpse4ac2827.jpg
curvature, bake concave data to the red channel and convex to the green channel its good for dirt accumulation masks, and worn edges.
bake base texture does what it sounds bakes the texture from the highpoly to the low poly
height bakes greyscale map with displacement information.
radiosity normal map, is a special normal map valve uses with some self shadowing information built in.
bake highpoly vertex colors, does what it sounds like (good for bakeing polyPaint from zbrush)
Thickness is greyscale data displaying the thickness of a mesh. (usefull for sub surface scattering shaders)
1. check out the artifact in the middle of the leg (the largest uv shell in the image).
2. ambient occlusion comes out to be too dark.
normal map -
occlusion map - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44187443/Forum%20Troubles/pilot_bake__occlusion.jpg
cavity map - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44187443/Forum%20Troubles/pilot_bake__cavity.jpg
diffuse map - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44187443/Forum%20Troubles/pilot_bake__vcols.jpg
OK so firstly I tried loading the 3D viewer with both high poly and a low poly mesh, but the viewer refused to open up showing an error that the mesh has too many triangles that exceed the limit that Xnormal can handle.
So in order to resolve this issue I exported out a slightly low res mesh from Zbrush and the viewer loaded this time. I built the cage and saved the meshes (.sbm files). So what exactly are these sbm files??
Also then I replaced the "slightly low res mesh" in the high poly mesh section of Xnormal with the original High poly mesh and it didn't bake out good normals. They were crap actually.
So to resolve this now, I used the low poly .sbm file as an external cage for the low poly mesh and it worked. I had perfect bakes.
But I don't know exactly why did that work out. Is the lowPoly.sbm file actually the cage mesh file??? I hope you are getting what I'm trying to explain!!
I use xnormal made cages frequently and haven't run into any problems.
I just dont get the whole idea.. what where obv??? i used the sbm low poly file as an external cage and it worked. How?? I dont know!!@#
would appreciate it if someone could have a look at it here,
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=125074
Why? there is edge padding by 17-16 set up in xnormal btw.
What I've read from past few pages is :
-cage
-separate smooth groups on hard edges
Why is that happened?
I haven't got flipped normals, if you mean by that the normals of the faces. And I don't have flipped faces.
I have all the HP mesh inside Cage.
I'll try bake the Object Space NormalMap, and then I'll see if any artifacts stiill are there.
How does it look when applied to the actual lowpoly?
I have a character model that conssts of like 20 seperate pieces ( armour, skirt, hair etc) I have both the low and high poly versions listed correctly in each tabs.
When I render it XNormal behaves as if these 20 seperate meseher are al in the same scene and theier cages are intersect. get terrible maps.
Here is the thread and an example map:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=125692
Batch Protection thing doesn't work by the way.
What? xD
never delete in rage
Thanks
DougClayton4231 The CUDA and OpenRL sacrifice some accuracy for performance, so it's possible that you could get sightly different results compared with the default renderer. Also, GPUs don't have much VRAM, memory for GPGPU usually is limited to 50% and some cards ( unlike pro Quadro/Tesla ) usually cannot virtualize the memory.
I don't know how long this has been the case. Last version I really used was 3.17 something. I used to be able to export from 3D Max a projected cage sbm file that had a modifier stack. As long as the bottom of it was an editable mesh. Now if I add anything to the stack, even a uvw, it wont allow the projection to export.
:::::::::::::::::
Also, might as well point this out.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1760269&postcount=30
Right now for the above when I split edges, I have to export the cage and mesh as objs separately versus using your sbm format.
One more question. I've been rendering normal maps for armor pieces that have smooth edges. My bakes are fine until they change direction suddenly (180 degrees), and I think the reason for the bad bakes on the sharp turns is because my low-poly geo isn't enough to capture the high poly. Creating cages helps but doesn't make it perfect. Do you guys add more geometry to support sharp turns? I want to hear how other people approaching baking normal maps for thinner objects with sharp turns like armor. Thanks so much!
I have tried;
- Straight export from Zbrush into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as SBM into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as FBX into Xnormal
- GoZ from Zbrush in Maya and export as OBJ into Xnormal
- Opening the OBJ as exported from Zbrush in Maya and Exporting as FBX and SBM
All of these still give the same effect when viewed in Xnormal. I can't see anything in Zbrush that should be causing it and in Maya it looks fine too.
Also, openRL renderer makes my entire AO map go black if I load more than one mesh into the high-res section. Works fine as long as there's only one mesh in there.
Anyway, Santy, a million thanks for Xnormal and you are a god among insects, etc.
EDIT: Turned out to be a smoothing groups/normals issue.
Do you guys think that baking from a Decimated model can affect the Normals of a NM map in an undesired way or it shouldn't change anything at all?
I'm pretty much totally new to xNormal so I really have no idea what's going on
IGNORE THIS!
Doofus here's normals were inverted, how embarrassing !
Hi, there.
I'm baking a normal map and a texture map from a high poly model with vertex color(polypaint).
When I press the Generate Maps button, xNormal seems working but after "Counting lowpoly Default's triangles across the screen..." is shown in the status bar, it never respond. I waited for 6 hours to complete the calculation but it still doesn't end.
The weird thing is the green/red indicator is working properly so it guess xNormal wasn't halted.
I used 3d viewer to check I can see those low and high poly models then It worked. Both models were shown in 3d viewer.
hm...I don't know what is wrong. does anybody get the same problem ??
I've uploaded them to DropBox. If anybody has a spare time, plz plz plz check them out.
This model is a forge.
Low poly model (obj format): https://db.tt/6PHYv4Nx
High poly model with vertex colors (obj format): https://db.tt/VLSMhqbg
Just in case, ZBrush project (zpr format): https://db.tt/gpt3cZux
Those low and high poly models are exported from ZBrush (sdiv1 and sdiv7) and used in xNormal.
Thanks in advance.
When I tried your files, I got the same issue, but when I imported your low poly into Maya the UVs were kind of screwed up (also all the normal were hard). Once I assigned some UVs and smoothed the normals it baked fine.
PS: I would recommend that you make a proper low poly, if this is just a test bake, then never mind.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem like this? I'm getting some strange banding issues with a xNormal (left) bake in Unity. On the other hand, 3dsMAX (right) one looks OK.
For AO (not sure if it works with cavity and others) on the baking options check the "discard backface hits" box on the upper left.
I have the nvidia tex tools installed (https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop)
"Could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of document"
What format are you saving them as?
The problem is that the precision and tech developed for the new engine shows all sorts of problems with pretty much every 3d apps current gen process of generating normal maps.
Every little imperfection that looked fine in previous engines shows up clear and ugly. Normally In any situation where I run into problems I turn to Xnormal to save the day, but in this case I can't find any way to get rid of the artifacts when baking in Xnormal! (Maya seems to do a slightly better job but still not entirely ideal.)
In the past I've been able to use workarounds using photoshop to bypass some of these issues but as I am required to bake all normal maps to 32 bit per channel .exr files to give to the programmers for processing, a lot of the tools in photoshop stop working entirely.
I'm seeing a lot of artifacts around the edges of uv charts but also where high poly meshes overlap each other. Just like what can be seen here in the polycount (image below taken from PC wiki)normal map wiki page:
I can't render at a higher resolution and down sample because photoshop's down rezing algorithms that provide the nicest results do not work on 32 bit per channel images (bilinear or nearest neighbor actually make the problem worse! and they're the only two available on 32bpc images)
so I have to rely entirely on xnormal to get rid of these kinds of artifacts. I've cranked the AA upto 4x but I'm still getting some nasty edges where ever the high-poly overlaps itself.
As for the uv chart edge artifacts, the programmers are telling me it looks like a precision issue of centriod sampling in a texel. "The center of a texel on the edge of a uv chart is technically on the other side of the mesh so when you shoot a ray it hits the other part of the mesh that's not associated with it."
This problem is particularly annoying because it's causing issues when it's mipped/filtered. The uv chart edge artifacts (which get dragged into the padding aswell) are actually showing up on the mesh!
Any ideas on how to fix some of this stuff would be greatly appreciated!
artquest, Perhaps you could dettach the X bandana from body and render separately.... or explode the model.
Self-AO will be ok but the shadow the bandana drops on the body probably will need to be composited in Photoshop 8(.
xn4 will include some improvements to that but xn3 is a bit limited in this aspect.