fritz' ? of the day: painting out normal map seams

fritz

i'm getting oh so close to finally getting some of this stuff straight thanks to lots of help from the peeps here. i am wondering if someone has advice on painting out normal map seams. a couple of my characters aren't really concepted to "hide" seams ie: no straps around the shoulder area and such. and i've done some tests and the seams aren't horrible but they are there. so any advice will help.

mucho gracias!!!

EarthQuake

load you low poly up in zbrush, dont apply smoothing at all. Add a flat white shader to it. Load your texture, sometimes you have to flip V for it to load right. Use projection master and smudge tool and whatnot to kill your seams. WOOT DONE.

fritz

oh dude....thanks EQ. i definitely give that a try.

Jay Evans

I've done this before, but I don't have z-brush in front of me at the moment. I belive you can import your texture into zbrush and use the fix seams button. Then export it again.

EarthQuake

Theres a fix seams button? WTF?

MoP

Yeah, it's down in the Texture rollout of the Tool section.
I don't know if it actually *entirely* fixes seams, I think it's more like the "padding" option in Max's render to texture - basically it just blends the pixels over the border of the UV segments on your flat texture, so that mip-mapping won't make the seams show up.

It might do more than that though, I haven't used it all that extensively.

Sean McBride

1) Clone the polygons touching the seam.
2) Re UV the polygons that you've cloned onto a map thats larger than the original.
3) apply a push mod of 0.1 to the cloned faces.
4) render to texture (diffuse) and throw that in photoshop.
5) you'll see your seam in the rendered texture just paint it out with a clone brush.
6) load that texture up onto the cloned faces.
7) select the original model and render to texture picking the new strip.
8) that will dump out a seam fix layer so you can just plop that down on top of your work in photoshop!

I use this technique at work. Given we have a script that does all of the technical crap for you but thats the technique before we had the script. It creates nearly invisible seams. I havn't used it for normal maps, but if you know how normal maps work you can keep to the constraints of the x and y normal map detail. and probobly pull of the same thing that you could with a diffuse texture.

fritz

i was able to paint out some seams via projection master...but then when i exported the the texture and applied it to the model in max....it was all eff'd up. my model is 95% seamless due to UVing tricks for baking. however these last areas are causing probs...oh so close....yet so far away. arrrgghh!

EarthQuake

Screenshots of eff'd up?