Overlaping Normal Maps

vertex

Hello everyone! I've been recently playing around with Z-brush and 3ds max 8 trying to normal map and so far so good. Now I've seen some of you guys' maps and I noticed that you are able to use half of the character's UVS for the normals. My question is how are you guys able to do that? sense I remember reading somewhere that the UVS shouldnt be overlaping when importin the obj to Z-brush or otherwise it'll crash.
THanks

Mongrelman

Take your character with mirrored normals, select uvs for one side and shrink them down and cramp them into a corner (not overlaping any uvs).

Bake the normal map, then apply it to the model you saved before you shrunk the overlapping uvs.

vertex

Thats genious! I'll try that as soon as I get home. I guess that in order to get the two perfect halfs UVS I should unwrap before the symmetry righ? Or would this show seams at the center of the character? At what stage do you guys get half UVS or what approach would give better results?
THanks again Lupus!

Mongrelman

That's whaty I tend to do; uv map half, mirror the geometry and keep the uvs overlapped, save that model. Then go back to the model and shrink down the overlapped uvs and save that model out as a different name (ie. modelbake), so I can just bake with that one and apply maps to the other.

Mirror down the center of a character can look odd at times, partifularly if you're doing something like a pattern, camouflage etc. were there will be an obvious mirror line. A way of getting around that is to offset the mirror line a bit off center (ie. like from the middle of a collarbone down to the side of the crotch).
For that, just uv map the model up to the mirror line (the larger section of the model), then you just mirror the geometry like before, and delete the overlapping geometry (or just don't mirror those polies in the first place).

I've had seams show up like this though (had to go back and fix them), hopefully people more adept at this will post and enlighten us both

poopinmymouth

No need to shrink


Just move your mirrored UVs exactly 1 unit out of the square. They will still pull from the correct area of the texture, but they won't be seen by the baker, now you don't need to copies, and you can rebake on this model with no problems.

StJoris

Hey I used to do that aswell, but I got some problems and blamed it on that, unfairly I see now. Good to know that wasn't the problem, I like how it works:)

Jesse Moody

i've been using the method that poops is showing for my recent work. I used to do all kinds of crazy things with uvs but lately been getting much faster and efficient because of a certain few tricks learned from the vets of polycount.

D4V1DC

Gj, poopster i always wanted to know that though I didn't get around to asking.

Gj on asking vertex!

vanilla

Does anyone know how to get Chuggnuts macroscript to load at startup? I use this offset UV feature every now and then. Manually loading it everytime with "run script" is tedious.

Also Id like to know how to get the Layer Manager pallet to open on startup as well.. Im using Max8.

Eric Chadwick

His script replaces the default UVW Edit Window script. Rename \3dsmax8\UI\Macroscripts\Macro_UnwrapUI.mcr to Macro_UnwrapUI.backup, then put Chuggnut's mcr there, named Macro_UnwrapUI.mcr.

vanilla

awesome! thankyou very much

fritz

turbounwrap has this as well.

vertex

thanks, I tried that chuggnutts plugin and it works like a charm. Now, I wanted to aply the symetry to the entire character including the face so I mirrored everthing one unit to the right but I'm getting seams through the middle of the character hm??? Oh by the way i'm baking the normal map in muddbox then aplying that map to the low poly in max. I noticed that you bring the high poly in max and bake it from there. Are there any advantages from this vs getting the normals straight from zbrush or mudbox?