Mirroring normalmaps?

chrisdekitchen

Hey, I'm creating a character and I'm thinking about mirroring his hands to save some space. The problem is that I'm aiming to put a normalmap on the character later on and I'm not sure if mirroring a hand will create a seam in the normalmap where the hand is connected to the arm. Since one of the hands will be normalmapped with the values from the other hand, and therefore might not match with that sides arm. Erhm, get my point? Anyone know if there's a sollution to this problem? I was thinking of pulling some of the edges connecting the hand to the arm on the mirrored side and then doing that sepperately. Or is that really necessary?

almighty_gir

this was answered in my thread yesterday.

basically it depends on the engine your using. some engines support normals mirrored entiredly down the models center. some engines can have a bit of creative mirroring, and some engines dont support mirroring at all.

so which engine are you going to be using?

chrisdekitchen

Ok, cool. Well I was thinking of importing it into the source engine. It's a character for my portfolio so I'm also considering the quake 4 and BF2 engine.

almighty_gir

as far as im aware, source and quake 4 both allow mirrored normals. no idea about BF2

Jay Evans

you can't mirror 3p character normal maps at all in BF2.

chrisdekitchen

Ok, thx guys, I got the mirroring working with normalmaps in max now. I might post a pic or something once I've cleaned it up and textured the model.