Problem with baking normal in Max

Valkier

I brought this up in chat but none of us could figure out why it was happening, so I decided to try here for a broader perspective.

I have the object unwrapped, albeit it poorly. Lights are set up, brought into a fresh scene, everything. For some reason one side of my gun is baked fine, while the other is not accounted for in the normals, leaving a giant black space.

So far we've tried cranking up the cage, resetting the xform, bringing it into a new scene, brighter lights, dimmer lights, shadows on, shadows off, and turning off using the cage and just scaling up the offset. None of this seems to be making it render that side.

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/7984/riflenormalqi8.jpg

for reference. Basically the top left corner should have an identicle side of the gun, but is certainly lacking. I appreciate any help offered.

Mark Dygert

Try flipping the missing UV pieces and see how it renders. I forget what setting you need to switch so it renders through the back faces of your UV but flipping the pieces so they are right reading should solve the problem also.

On second thought I think it might be a MentalRay issue, does it still do it if you render using scanline?

Valkier

Thanks. Looks like just flipping the maps did it. Now I get to clean up all the red! oh boy!