xnormal seams from maya files

_Aurel_

I'm having an issue in maya where my normal maps end up having seems in it where it looks like this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v63/Infernal_Lawyer/xnormal_example2.jpg

Basically, I heard that maya has its uv channels as +x, +y, +z, and I'm supposed to flip them to be +x, -y, +z because that's the settings they're using in maya. Is that what's even causing the seems in the first place? I've done tons of google searches and the only thing I got that seems to remotely be related to flipping those channels is in the set vertex normal channel but I don't even want to remotely mess with that because I get even more bizarre results.

I'm sure I'm screwing up somewhere but I haven't got it down where. If you want to take a look at my normal map here it is:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v63/Infernal_Lawyer/xnormal_example.jpg

Notice the strange rainbow effect I'm getting at the edges? I think that's not supposed to be normal. So I'd gladly appreciate it if anyone can set me straight here. Thanks in advance.

P.S. Yes, I did try inverting the green channel in Photoshop but that didn't work at all.

Firebert

http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html

have you checked this out? just curious. doesn't look like you have any independent uvs at the edges in question (i think, kinda hard to tell from the images), and it really doesn't look like you have any room for ANY padding... but i can't really tell without seeing your actual map and some wires of your lowpoly...

my rough guess would be that if you separate the uvs on the hard turn edges and allow some room for padding, you'll see a difference... however, i just woke up... sooooo yeah

Jason Young

+x, -y, +z is for Max and Unreal. +x, +y, +z is what Maya uses and xNormal uses by default. If you click on the green box next to normal map checkbox in the baking options in xNormal it'll bring up options to change it. Make sure it's +x, +y, +z, which it should be if you haven't manually changed it.

The seams look like hard normal edges you have. There's info in the gigantic normal mapping thread about how to deal with hard edges/smoothing groups, and it entails breaking your uv seams whenever there's a hard normal edge.

_Aurel_

I actually did devide up the edges where it gets hard, here's an example.



For the most part, I have 2 or more pixels in-between my edges. I took a look at that thread and that subject... I think I get what I'm doing wrong, but I don't think I'm doing it wrong, that's the issue here. BTW, this is going into torque engine, so I'm supposed to use -y in xnormal then flip it if I want to view it in maya.

Firebert

just out of curiosity... have you seen the results you would get by using transfer maps in maya? i'm just wondering what result you would get as xnormal leans better towards the organic side than straight up hard surface. not saying this is a solution, but i'm just curious.

EarthQuake

The problem here is that your "cage" is unwelded at your hard edges, you need to edit the cage in XN to fix this, select all the verts and hit weld, then save your mesh and load that as your lowpoly.

In max/maya there is a simple setting to switch between the two options, but its a bit of a pain in xn.