would you say that its possible have lots of seams in a character model with normal maps and specular and still have it look right in the game engine ie not see the seams?
depends where the seams are.
if you put the UV seams along actual material boundaries (like if he has a metal shoulderpad over a cloth arm piece, cut the seam to match the line where metal changes to cloth), and put the seams in places people aren't likely to notice (inside the crease of concave shapes etc), then people are less likely to notice.
If you have a UV seam over the middle of a large shiny metal area, it's really gonna be noticeable no matter what you do.
If you have a UV seam over the middle of a large shiny metal area, it's really gonna be noticeable no matter what you do.
[/ QUOTE ]
Not true. Depends on the engine. At Neversoft our normal map shader could handle a seam anywhere, as smooth as you like, and if your normal map was baked correctly, you could zoom in till it filled the screen and not notice the seam. However most engines, you're correct, do a horrible job rendering seams well. It is possible though to get a correct normal map display with no seams. It just depends on the quality of your render-engine programmer.
commenting on what poop said this is something that -really-really- bugs me about normal mapping, i think its great and I work with it every day BUT it seems like every since shader is completely inconsistant with how it handles the normal map. Some handle mirroring fine, some you have to scale along the W, there's some shaders that give wavy lines in the model (max's default shader).
Anyways, completely matching the color on both sides of the seam should help you, and if you keep noticing it in a shiny spot make sure your specular map doesn't have a seam in it as well. You can have a perfect diffuse and normal map but if you dont hit up the spec as well that can mess it all up.
Also, if your engine has problems displaying the normals correctly with seams, it helps to have the offending edges as parallel to each other as possible, best horizontally or vertically, and to have them running in places where the lowpoly is quite close to the highpoly anglewise, so it's working more as a bumpmap than actually defining the form.
Replies
if you put the UV seams along actual material boundaries (like if he has a metal shoulderpad over a cloth arm piece, cut the seam to match the line where metal changes to cloth), and put the seams in places people aren't likely to notice (inside the crease of concave shapes etc), then people are less likely to notice.
If you have a UV seam over the middle of a large shiny metal area, it's really gonna be noticeable no matter what you do.
If you have a UV seam over the middle of a large shiny metal area, it's really gonna be noticeable no matter what you do.
[/ QUOTE ]
Not true. Depends on the engine. At Neversoft our normal map shader could handle a seam anywhere, as smooth as you like, and if your normal map was baked correctly, you could zoom in till it filled the screen and not notice the seam. However most engines, you're correct, do a horrible job rendering seams well. It is possible though to get a correct normal map display with no seams. It just depends on the quality of your render-engine programmer.
Anyways, completely matching the color on both sides of the seam should help you, and if you keep noticing it in a shiny spot make sure your specular map doesn't have a seam in it as well. You can have a perfect diffuse and normal map but if you dont hit up the spec as well that can mess it all up.