Rendering Lowpoly normalmaped Char

katzeimsack

Hi, I tried to make a beauty render for the dominace war, but failed miserably. Normalmaps are only working in hardware render and look wired in mr or software

Used Googel and some plugins/tool, but nothing works

I am using maya7...

Daz

Hey man, If you take a look at my generals thread, you might notice the intense pain that I went through with this.

I find it simply amazing that Alias didn't think that this was something maya 7.0 should be able to do out of the box. As you can quite probably clearly see, they simply render as greyscale bump, not normal.

Try pixeros shader here ( jsnormal mapper ). After some tweaking I eventually got it to work with the software renderer. He has an mray version, but I haven't tried that yet.

www.pixero.com

katzeimsack

could you please zip you shadingnetwork? Tired it but it didn't work

e: only tried the mr version, will try the maya version after work

Daz

www.daz-art.com/arm.zip

katzeimsack

thx I will try your zip after work

after over two days of trying, I will finally be able to render my general!

Now all I need is a maya which is able to bake ao from high to low

thomasp

are you guys sure it's maya's fault? because i clearly remember that back in the stone age of normal mapping, clever people were releasing scripts and shading networks for maya 4/5-ish releases that rendered normal maps just fine. maybe, just maybe there's info about this still to be found on bay raitt's spiraloid forum and/or in the zbrush practical guide.

of course, nothing that should be simple is actually easy to achieve in maya, but i guess you expected nothing less

katzeimsack

It's mayas fault

The standard maya7 normalmap shader only works with hardware-redering turned on..

thomasp

just dug out the old link. is this obsolete stuff, perhaps? anyway worth a try i guess: http://www.drone.org/tutorials/normal_maps.html
originally mentioned here: http://cube.phlatt.net/forums/spiraloid/viewtopic.php?TopicID=395

scanning_factor

Depending on how you're generating your normal map, you can try generating an object space version, which can be rendered with both Mental ray and maya software. The only ways i've found to render a tangent space normal map involve things like building a TBN matrix and wiring a light to your maya shader, which works somewhat but limits you to only using one light. Painful. . .rendering tangentspace normal maps is definitely a point of contention for the Autodesk Games Advisory meeting next week

Daz

Oh its mayas fault allright thomasp

In max you simply plug it in and it works in the viewport and renders properly.

Why on earth should you need to go trawling around the internet to get maya to do the same? Besides, the pixero solution will suffice, but it still means that you need a different shader for viewport versus rendering.

Can you imagine working on a game using maya with 50 normal mapped characters each with multiple materials, and production requests renders of every one, so you need to redo all the shaders for every single character just to render them?. F that. Its bullshit that Alias didnt consider that requirement.

scanning_factor

[ QUOTE ]
Its bullshit that Alias didnt consider that requirement.

[/ QUOTE ]

Im starting to think alot of Alias's stance on Maya being a game dev platform is bullshit. Compare Max's ability to display realtime shaders vs Mayas. The CgFX shader, while functional is pretty completely undocumented and the ASHLI shader is just garbage. . .hopefully now that Autodesk is at the helm Maya will become a better game dev environment. . .

thomasp

well daz, that kind of annoyances usually are the price to pay for flexibility, i guess. or maybe it's god's punishment, dunno. i guess the usual maya workaround for this is called a technical artist or tool developer

anyway i never understood why maya is considered "game-dev enabled", look once at how it handles key texturing stuff like transparency in the viewport and be done with it, i'd say.

oh and max can be pretty limited sometimes, i tried some max-scripting and hated it. custom hlsl viewport shaders are actually slow and sometimes crash-happy/limited. useful for a quick preview, hardly more. and the default metal bump shader looks so nasty, you wouldn't want to apply it to something other than mechanical bits 'n pieces.
the grass isn't so much greener on this side.

scanning factor: isn't cgFX way outdated? i looked it up a while ago and it seemed they never made it beyond maya 4.5/5.0 with the plugin. never heard much news of cg after the 2003 release anyway.

Zergxes

Glad I'm not the only one who gets mad about this stuff. I found a few times when I yelled about something Maya lacked they eventually came around to adding it. That happened with the lasso select tool and the cut faces tool. I think they had our college bugged. Maybe I should go back and holler some more.

scanning_factor

[ QUOTE ]
i guess the usual maya workaround for this is called a technical artist or tool developer


[/ QUOTE ]

We're the last line of defense between Maya and angry artists. . .:D

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scanning factor: isn't cgFX way outdated? i looked it up a while ago and it seemed they never made it beyond maya 4.5/5.0 with the plugin. never heard much news of cg after the 2003 release anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's definitely still around, Cg and it's ilk make their home on platforms that dont use DX (ps3 for example). There's really no difference between CgFX and the DXFX standard, Cg compiled shaders just play better in non-DX sandboxes.

katzeimsack

thx DAz! Works )))))
nice to hear I'm not the onlyone having problems ...

I finally were able to 'finish' my general
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=109347&page=0&vc=#Post109347