Crysis ingame rock model problem

NAIMA

Hello I have made a rock , modeled in 3dsmax , uvmapped in 3dsmax and zbrush , relaxed etc .... made texture seamless in mudbox , created the normal map out of the texture itself and not throught sculpting then I went to paint middle level the seams parts of the sculpt to make it plain and not bumpy and then smoothed the inner parts that dont touch the seams but are close , this to my opinion should have avoided any bump' bad seams problems ingame , tough its not like that and even if I put a totally flat normal map , I get visible cut edged seams that instead arent present if I remove the normal map , anyoen could tell me why this is like this in crysis engine and how to fix it?

Thanks a lot ....

the smaller bumps are due to a detail bump I added to give close fine detail but they do not affect the offsetting couse I tried without the normal map and the seams are fine ....


I add also the files if someone would be so gentel to take a look and see what's wrong ? ....

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Q8VJGDST

Eric Chadwick

This is a common problem. It has to do with an artist baking the normal map in a program that doesn't use the same Tangent Basis that the in-game shader uses.

You have to do some testing with different baking apps to find which works best with that game. What does Crytek recommend? IIRC they recommend you use their baker, called PolyBump I think?

teaandcigarettes

Did you try flipping the green channel? I don't bake in Max so I have no idea what settings does it use, but in Xnormal you have to invert the Y setting to make it look correctly in CE2. If Max uses the same settings by default, then that's surely the case.

Eric:

Yes, Crytek recommends using PolyBump. However, with the right settings applied, I have yet to encounter any problems while using XNormal.

NAIMA

I didnt try that I will try but did anyone try the files I uploaded?

And flipping the green vertically or horizontally?

Alsosince I am making a normal map out of a on the item directly painted texture I cant flip couse it would just switch the baking no?

NAIMA

Ok to fix the seams I had this idea , since I was using a normal map created throught a program out of the baked texture I couldnt flip anything so I used the normal map as a diffuse map to texture over the model in mudbox and fix the seams like this then reexport the map as diffuse and overwrite the normal and use the new texture as normal in crysis , so far seems to have fixed the issue .....

NAIMA

mmm No it idnt fix yet .....

Eric Chadwick

"Flipping the green" means inverting the green channel, so the blacks change to whites and the whites change to blacks.

When you converted the diffuse to a normal map, how exactly did you do this? If you used Crazy Bump or the NVIDIA Photoshop filter, then you'll still get seams, because your normal map needs to take into account the vertex normals of the low-poly model.

So, it's best to take the original high-res sculpted model, and the low-res UV'd model, and import them into Xnormal (or PolyBump) and bake your normal map there. Don't edit that normal map in Mudbox, first see if the Xnormal (or PolyBump) bake solves your seams in CryEngine.

btw, thanks for the info teaandcigarettes!

NAIMA

I made the texture in mudbox over the model then used CB for making the texture normal , but if I load a model there in this program I see that the seams are still visible , is there another way to do that? I have tried also to make just a zbrush work out of desperation but still seams !!! ...

btw I havent done any high res model , I wanted to use the same texture painted to create the normal map couse I supposed othave better seams and better reflection of the detail of the texture ....

NAIMA

SO IS NOT POSSIBLE TO FIX?

Eric Chadwick

Not the way you're trying to do it, no. You can generally use a Crazy Bump normal map seamlessly on a model... but only if the UVs have no seams, or if the model is mostly flat. Your rock has UV seams, and is not flat.

You might be able to use your diffuse map as a bump map on a high-res mesh, then use that to bake a normal map onto your low-poly mesh, using Xnormal. But the results are going to look poor. You should sculpt the rock as a high-res model instead of using a bitmap. This is a great way to go, should give you good results in CryEngine.
http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2010/03/3dsmax-environment-modeling-1.html

Oh, and please don't use all caps.

NAIMA

so the only way is to skip the normal mapping out of a program taken from a texture and instead go manually like with zbrush? or the Sacha Enrich way ? tough the later don't have much control , since I Wanted to have more smoothed tops and more roughy sides ... I have tried to do some normals with zbrush but I still get some seams problems ....

Eric Chadwick

Best thing is to do some quick tests to see which baking app makes seamless results in your target game.

Sascha's method is not the only way. If you need more control...
http://wiki.polycount.net/Digital_Sculpting#ES