man...i gotta xnormal/max RTT normal question.....

fritz

OK...i'm sorry, but the xnormal thread is just HUMONGOUS. i just want to know from the peeps that have been using it a lot if it's dramatically better than ripping normals out of max or pretty much the same. i'm baking normals out of max right now...and am getting a slight blur on them...and i just want to know if xnormal is lots crisper. thanks.

indian_boy

i love xNormal. its not fast [in fact its really slow] but its really great. especially if ur computer can't handle too many polies on screen at once: eg. my dom war entry's high res couldn't be loaded into Max without a crash... but xNormal easily created the normals [along with other] maps.

i recommend u try it out... along with any1 else who doesn't have it!

MoP

I rendered our DomWar2 creature normals out of XNormal mainly because it was just so much more straightforward - didn't need a control cage or anything, just tweak a few numbers for ray distance, and I got a bunch of nice, clean normals very quickly.
There were a couple of trouble spots (like where the toes were very close together), but I found combining 2 different normals generated with different ray distance settings was still much faster than manually tweaking a cage.
The nice thing about not using a cage, too, is you get very consistent results - if you move a projection vertex in max, that means you'll create slightly different normals in that area, which can be annoying if you base a diffuse/spec texture off that, then have to re-render the normals with a different cage or altered verts - it won't quite match up anymore.

diminished_Self

hey mop, you know that you can render without the cage in max right? in the render to texture dialog, click the options button in the projection mapping section, then uncheck the Use Cage box. The ray distance is controlled by the offset radio dial.



comes in very hand for hard surface, and isnt to shabby for organics either.

MoP

Oh nice, I'd never tried that. I should probably give that a shot, thanks!

EarthQuake

Yeah you can turn off the cage, but xnormal is still way more straight forward and easier to set up, and wont randomly crash on you like max

thomasp

tried all these normal map render tools and found nothing that could beat max for troublefree handling of floating and tiny bits and control over output. i always turn off cage and ray miss check for the first pass. only if problems arise, i turn on cage, fix that particular area and compose in PS.

fritz

"and wont randomly crash on you like max"

man...you don't like that??? i don't understand...i get a warm feeling inside when that happens.
oh wait...maybe that's called RAGE!

Ruz

'uv match' is handy in max also. I tend to use this a lot
obviously if you have uv mapped you low poly mesh , then exported to zbrush, keeping the same uv's on your high res mesh, this works perfect