Jagged Normal maps - video card issue?

Microneezia

Hello there,

My GPU fan melted off its construct and careened into my mobo making harsh buzzing sounds during my lunch today. Im not sure if the chip is burnt or not yet, luckily my PC shut down right away... but either way for now, Im 'on-board' with an Intel GPU. Which is altogether hideous.

Im wondering, I just baked a normal map of this pillar, the ornamentation is floating. The normal map went to jaggy city as you can see. Im not an expert but ive made cleaner normal maps with much more organic/ hard to unwrap / complecated cage structures. Its probably because im using onboard video?

I dont know what to root for, not knowing how to do it properly or not being able to make maps at all because of video card burn-out.

oh i just remember, also on the ornamentation I have 4 smooth groups, 1-4. and that piece that has 4 groups is replicated all over the place as you can see.

heres a pic.



thank you!

Michael Knubben

That just seems lowres to me. Did you try unwrapping it at double the resolution and downsizing? Although at that res, you'll be hardpressed to get better results. What does the normalmaop itself look like? Maybe that's alright, but your onboard can't handle the normalmap at its full res?

Microneezia

Here is the Normal, i rendered out at 1024 sq. I just copied and pasted this from the TGA to a JPG so Imageshack can host.

Do you typically render out at double res and then scale down? Im not sure what you mean by "at that res" what are you referring to, which res wont get better results..

Eric Chadwick

The detail tiles perfectly, so just bake out one tile into a square normal map, then tile it across your pillar.

Neox

antialiasing or rendering double the size and rescaling it might help a bit, but the textureresolution just doesn't fit the detail you want to show, try simpler patterns or tile more as eric suggested

Michael Knubben

Agreed with the tiling comments. Either that, or think about how thin you make your detail on the highpoly. If you're going to model intricate details, you need to realise that none of it can be smaller than one pixel, and even if it's going to be two pixels big, that's going to be a tight fit, and you'd be better off doing it in photoshop.
The reason people might render their normalmaps and then downsize is to fake antialiasing, which can take a while to do (and not every program does it) so you soften any sharp, pixelly edges.

Microneezia

so you suggest baking the original segment at a higher res and tile that across the post? or do the same res as one of the tiles? Ill try those this morning.

does it require more budget to have say 2 separate 512 files in a scene rather than one single 1024? I was going to have this post part of a larger texture, but perhaps it doesnt matter how many texture files you have in a scene only the total size and span of the texture in total?

Can you tile part of a larger texture?

Microneezia

Jagged edges fixed! Eric was right, tiling the repeating section of the normal map (at a higher res) worked perfect. I guess I was just trying to jam it too small of a section.

Im still wondering though now, can you tile a specific section a map. If I have a 1024 map, and I want to tile a 256x256 section of that map, is it possible? or is that just moot since everyone would simple make that 256 section a separate file?

Thanks Polycount for your help!

Eric Chadwick

Microneezia wrote: »

can you tile a specific section a map. If I have a 1024 map, and I want to tile a 256x256 section of that map, is it possible? or is that just moot since everyone would simple make that 256 section a separate file?

Yes. http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support/182-step-step-techniques-tiling-textures-3ds-max.html
It is not considered a separate texture file when you do this. More techniques here: http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment

Jonathan

If you're in Max and using the scanline renderer, try using Hammersly anti-aliasing at .5 or 1.0, or if you're using Mental Ray, try setting the anti-aliasing it to 1 and 4, or 4 and 16, etc. instead of the default 1/4 and 1/4 (IIRC). Also, if you downscale the normal map, perhaps run it through Nvidia filter to normalize it, as you never know if downscaling a normal map will generate "illegal" colors.