SHTools

SPIKEYMcJAFF

Hey,

I've been using SHTools for a few years but recently switched to a studio with they're own engine, and I've found that using 3DS MAX and MAYA to create my normal maps is having very diffrent results to SHTools, I'am getting a lot of smoothing problems I didnt get with SHTools. Ive taken A model that i used SHTools to render the normal map for and it looks fine in Unreal and then tried to get the same results with other packages but it looks so diffrent, like the normal maps arent really compensating for the smoothing on the low res model

I was wondering if theres anyone here that has worked with SHTools and knows how to get the same results using 3ds max or maya

thanks in advance for any help

Spike

bugo

yes, I have worked with SHtools in Max, but im a Maya user, I didnt like the way SHtools was doing my normal maps, he messes out some normals and didnt work quite great into Unreal engine as I expected. I´m not sure why you are getting bad results with Max and Maya, but I´m sure the best results could be get with xNormal and Turtle for Maya. One thing I miss on SHtools is that its system of dilation was really great, i didnt had to worry about nothing and just give a distance and render. But today xNormal and Turtle does that for you very great too.

EarthQuake

Most every engine/3d app calculates thier tangents/bitangents differently. What you want is for your NM renderer to be able to read the exact file that you will be using ingame(or atleast the appropriate format)

For our in-house engine we wrote a file loader for Xnormal( www.xnormal.net ) an awesomely free and awesomely fast tool to generated normals/ao/etc. The sdk is publicly available and i think it took one of our programmers like half a day to add out format to it. And now jogshy supports our format as well!!(just so we dont have to rebuild with every new release) Anyway this helped us a TON, now we get accurate results, what we get from xnormal is what we see in game. I've heard that UE3/shtools really does some magic when it comes to smoothing errors or lack thereof, so you may be disapointed to fidn that the engine you're using simply isnt up to par as well.

bugo

Well, as for games i worked, it DIDNT work quite great SHtools with Unreal, but who knows what they made...