Weird experience with normal mapping

Colditz

Hi everyone,

I'm new at the board, just reading some thread from time to time. I have a question regarding baking of normal maps with 3ds max 2010, I'm new with this stuff, done only texture and specular mapping and some ambient occlusion in the last few years.

This is my high poly mesh:



The problem,.. well. You can see it at the screenshots.



If I use as recommended one smoothing group for the mesh, it looks mostly good, but some kind of distorted and with a few darker spots.



On the other side, if I use no smoothing group for the entire mesh, the map looks excellent with all proportions, but with heavy visible seams. It looks at least more like the high poly model.

I've got no idea what to do, and hope you guys here may have some tips for me :thumbup:

Thanks!

Eric Chadwick

Generally it helps to make hard edges where ever you have UV seams.

This might help.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#SGAHE

System

Do you mean those small greyish lines? It could just be a viewport shader bug or an incorrect setting, requiring you to flip a channel or two.

If not, uv seams where the mapping is mirrored/overlapped could be an issue. You could fix that by copying a few pixels near the seam of the normal map and pasting them just outside the seam to provide matching padding.
Otherwise, open the normal map in an image editor and zoom right in to the offending areas to verify: if colours are blended or if there are specific sharp colour contrast areas which don't following the general colour pattern seen in the normal map - it should be fairly obvious.