still not working, getting the same result each time. perhaps it was something in my creation of the normal maps. I made them in xNormals with the the pretty much the default settings. I did reduce edge padding a bit. The only thing I can think of is perhaps I messed something up when I combined my different normals maps into 1.
any takers on what might be causing this? what type of settings do you guys use when you bake out of xNormals, maybe something is wrong there. I did have to combine maps in photoshop, perhaps an issue popped up there when I did that? perhaps the alpha channels got screwed up or something?
This looks like a problem with your tangent-space coordinates not matching up with the normalmap on one of the forearms. I notice you have one, shared arm in your normalmap so I'm guessing you mirrored your forearm UVs? Ideally this should still work with a proper tangent-space. Tangents of the two arms should be different somehow to match the geometry flip.
I'd blame whatever app generated your tangents. It might be Maya, in which case try a different model format. Or it could be xNormal, it generates tangents when it doesn't find any (ex: when using OBJs). And who knows how xNormal handles mirrored geometry. You could also dupe the hand UVs like you have with the shoes.
thanks thomasp, I'll try your suggestions, i figured the normals ont he arm might be flipped it's just a dupe of the other arm that doesn't have issues. I did freeze my mesh as soon as I started the uv process. if i triangulate the mesh will it effect my uvs at all? I'll back up the file and give that a try too if the other things don't help.
In maya anytime you flip duplicate and flip a mesh (enter a negative value in either x y or z axis) and then freeze that mesh it inverts the face normals.
To check if this happens
Display -> Polygons -> Face Normals :: If the green lines aren't facing the same direction, there you go.
There are several options and ways to resolve the problem within maya.
The easiest way that seems to work a good chunk of the time (not 100%) is to combine the meshes together, BEFORE freezing transforms.
Other than that there are several options that work in different situations under the Polygons Menu F3 -> Normals
(regardless of the fix in this situation, I suspect it's going to involve rebaking your normal map so it will bake with correct normals.)
Thank you everyone for your help, each suggestion helped me solve my problem.
I'm about 90% sure it was an issue with the way I combined normal maps, I just overlayed them an adjusted the blue channels to about 50% of their value. I came across ncombiner that properly combines normal maps.
The reason why I'm now sure this was my problem because my original 3 maps worked once combined with ncombiner. The normals issue with the arm was an easy fix, it actually fixed itself when I combined everything into 1 mesh, the normals were all facing outward. I will say though even the arm with the normals issue in marmoset displayed outward facing normals before it was sent to marmoset but perhaps it's just something I'm not really grasping. It's works now.
You can see here the normals are facing the same way.
I'm about 90% sure it was an issue with the way I combined normal maps, I just overlayed them an adjusted the blue channels to about 50% of their value.
Glad you got the issue sorted!
How did you adjust the blue channel? Were there muttiple maps that were overlayed or just one?
I find the fastest way is to double click that layer that is to be overlayed and then simply uncheck the blue there.
How did you adjust the blue channel? Were there muttiple maps that were overlayed or just one?
I find the fastest way is to double click that layer that is to be overlayed and then simply uncheck the blue there.
I actually pasted all 3 maps together, set the layers to overlay, then adjusted the levels on the blue channel (dropped to 128) for the top two layers then merged down. I'm pretty sure that ended up being the wrong way to do it. It looked fine in Maya but not in Marmoset. I still have a lot to learn about normals and photoshop.
Weird shading on my imported model. the only way to correct this that i know is to turn on the obj space normal on. but i hear thats not the correct way to fix it?
Weird shading on my imported model. the only way to correct this that i know is to turn on the obj space normal on. but i hear thats not the correct way to fix it?
Are your vert. normals all pointing in the same direction?
The thing is.. on my first pic. The model it's not even normal mapped.. just default phong material with default grey.tga as diffuse and flatnorm.tga as normal. So there is really nothing to flip for this case.
Also the wheels. It looks like it has weird smoothing group issue on it. And the normal looks really jaggy with object space normal=off. Where you can see that nothing really wrong with my normal map and it looks ok with obj space normal=on... (except that it not behave as normal but as a bump /height.)
edit : just tried sample model from marmoset folder. comfy chair etc, they all looks great with and without material applied on them.
Do you have smoothing groups/hard edges applied to your meshes that are imported into Marmoset?
Your normal map should compensate for any smoothing issues as long as the mesh that was used to bake the map was identical as the one you using in Marmoset.
If you baked a Tangent Space map, then you should never select Object Space as it will never work correctly (though if you bake an Object Space map, you wont have any smoothing issues as the LP smoothing is ignored)
If you want to send me over the meshes and maps, zip them up and I would be happy to take a look.(HP and LP in .obj please, as i don't use Max or Maya)
Hi everyone! I am having the issue that Marmoset is lagging right from the get go. As soon as I launch the program, it gives me a black screen after loading a model and every click takes several seconds to respond, making Marmoset unusable. At home it works alright but at work is impossible due to this annoying lag. Does anyone have any idea as to why?
Hi everyone! I am having the issue that Marmoset is lagging right from the get go. As soon as I launch the program, it gives me a black screen after loading a model and every click takes several seconds to respond, making Marmoset unusable. At home it works alright but at work is impossible due to this annoying lag. Does anyone have any idea as to why?
Are you using the latest version of your GPUs drivers? What card do you have?
@binopittan, It looks like your smoothing groups you used to bake with were not applied and transferred correctly when you exported the .obj.
Im not sure what smoothing groups you had setup, but i just applied basic hard edges along all the UV island edges and it already looks much better. There are still errors in the pic, but unless i know the exact smoothing groups you used for the bake, i cant get around that :P
binopittan: this might be stupid but are you sure that you exported your vertex normals? That might explain why it worked when metalliandy exported the mesh?
Well, i'm not using fancy smoothing group method.. just the usual way.
Can you just please mail me back the corrected mesh
Conclusion i can draw so far :
1. If the corrected mesh rendered on my PC looks the same with screenshot above, then probabbly something wrong with my export setting on 3dmax.
2. If it still looks crap , the problem maybe on my video card, bad ATI driver perhaps ?
HAL this is how i export my model.. am i doing it wrong?
lol i,m having a headhache..
1st pic, is the mesh Andy mail me back.. it looks ok.
2nd pic, thats my mesh, this time with with normal tickbox checked on ( from what i,ve tested earlier there is no difference from the result whether th normal tickbox on or off )
3rd pic, the exact same obj used on 2nd pic.. imported to max. aka how it supposed to looks like ( smoothing group wise )
I,m gonna experimenting on various option on exporting my mesh for now.
I,m using max 9, i'd like to know if there is any max 9 user have same issue as mine ?
EDIT : Scratch that.. i,m exporting as FBX. works like charm! finally .. thx everyone XD
Didn't know if this has already been brought up but when you turn on SSAO...everything will receive it including little cards using the "Add" blend mode. Say I have two planes intersecting perpendicularly:
the texture is just black with the blend mode set to add and it will have a laser type of effect running through it on the texture. Basically faking an alpha card without a needed alpha channel. The SSAO ruins the effect by revealing the two planes If there is no way to fix this, maybe in a future update have a checkbox next to each mesh for "accept post processing" or something. Any suggestions?
So here's a question for those of you who like to tinker with marmoset. It's about dynamic light creation. What i've tried is import an HDRI into hdrshop, create a vertical cross from the original panorama, save it out as a pfm, and do the same for the original HDRI ( minus brightest pixels.) So far so good.
In the skytool in marmoset, i am able to load both those images, the spheres reflectivity and ambient lighting are working, the shadow direction widget seems to indicate correct shadows, but i can't seem to see those spheres casting shadows. Also, in the reflections, it seems like the marmoset can't "wrap" the vertical cross correctly and the reflections show the cross instead of a full environment. The hdr images are loaded as vertical cross in the settings.
Anyway, i go ahead and create the sky, and when i load it up in marmoset, i only get ambient lighting. I tried taking a look into the .env file that is created, and it seems to differ a bit from the preset ones. I tried editing shadow direction on there, didn't do a thing.
I've also tried changing the vertical cross cubemaps generated from HDRShop into .dds cubemap from the old ATI cube map generator software, and if i do that, when i throw the maps into the skytool, i get a system freeze.
Sorry for the lengthy post, but i've been really excited lately to try to create my own sky environments in marmoset... so if anyone has successfully created one, i'd love to get some directions and help?
Now i have another trouble understanding how lights in Marmoset works.
Here is my tank with Riverside Ambience light.. i add another red lightbulb with max intensity just for the test. Strange.. nothing seems to change.
And then i get my specular map disabled, and bam! the light is there.. So what exacly this is means? I can't use another light if my model have specular map on it?
Hey guys, I'm trying out some displacement stuff. My problem is that once i load a displacement (any displacement on any model) specular gets all messed up if the fresnel slider is anything but zero (causes all polys to furiously blink randomly)
Using latest toolbag, and 6990 with latest drivers, and win7 64.
This all works fine at home on my 470 (same models, displacements etc), unfortunately the only dx11 system I have at work is with this ati card. Ever seen this or know of any fix for it?
Im having the same problem that binopittan was (still is?) having above.
I have a mesh and the yellow light that I added shows up when I have the diffuse and normal map applied but as soon as I tick on the spec map, the light stops working.
It's there, just not lighting anything.
I tested it out on some other meshes and its happening there too, so I know it's not the mesh. I've been using Marmoset for a while and I have never experienced this problem till now. Did the update break something?
I've searched everywhere I could for an explanation on how to get skybox to work, but I have come up with nothing that gets me what I need. Everything is working fine except for the fact that it won't light my scene. It only does ambient. How do I get it to use lighting like the default environment lighting scenarios? (First image is preset, second is custom that's not working properly)
I have searched everywhere I could for a solution to my problem, but to no avail. I am trying to make my own custom skybox for rendering, but the lighting does not happen like in the preset environments. Only the ambient shows up. Why is this happening? (images are rendered with blue sky preset and my custom desert one)
Is there actually a bright dominant sun in your environment? Also I think it helps if you have a 16 or 32 bit image to get a better range of lighting out of an HDR/cubemap.
@Either.Ardrey, a few things to know about using the Sky Tool:
1)As ceebee already pointed out, for maximum range of lighting you will want to use HDR images for your source. If you don't have HDR images handy, or not too comfortable generating your own in Photoshop, standard 8-bit images will work, the final exported environment just wont be *as* pretty.
2) More importantly, if you are generating custom lighting environments and you want shadows, you will need to have 2 source images in your sky tool: "light image" and "shadow image". The shadow image is what will determine the direction of the sun/light. If a custom shadow image is not loaded, your environment will be ambient light only. The Toolbag User Manual has a further explanation of the shadow image and how to create it.
*GOOD NEWS* We do have an in-depth Sky Tool tutorial releasing to the public later this week.
@binopittan - The toolbag trial splash screen will start counting down with about 5 days remaining. If it's not telling you exactly how many days are left before it expires, you're currently at more than 5
@MrHobo & @binopittan - please email us with your system specs (especially GPU), screenshots w/ your 'Light' tab and 'Mat' tab visible, and a rundown of what you're doing when the spec and dynamic lights start not playing nicely. We're not having much luck repro'ing it here.
@ceebee: There is a dominant sun. Also, does that mean that 24 bit is the worst for this? They are currently 24bit Targas.
@getawesome13: The shadow direction widget shows that it is reading the sun light direction correctly, and I do have both shadow and light images. Can any full version of photoshop generate HDRs (I have CS4)? If so, how do I save the images as such?
Also what is the minimum amount of brightness separation that should be used for the cubemaps, between the sun and the next brightest non-sun, non-main-lighting pixel?
Heads up, I had this problem with my old laptop since I had played with my drivers control panel (nvidia), it could be the AA or GI, don't remember, but that could be worth a try.
@ceebee: There is a dominant sun. Also, does that mean that 24 bit is the worst for this? They are currently 24bit Targas.
@getawesome13: The shadow direction widget shows that it is reading the sun light direction correctly, and I do have both shadow and light images. Can any full version of photoshop generate HDRs (I have CS4)? If so, how do I save the images as such?
Also what is the minimum amount of brightness separation that should be used for the cubemaps, between the sun and the next brightest non-sun, non-main-lighting pixel?
My shadow direction is reading correctly in the skytool, and all my images are HDR (32 bit) and I only seem to get ambient lighting and no shadow. I've tried everything possible that I could think of and Im totally stuck. @getawesome13, I cannot wait until a detailed tutorial to creating your own sky environment becomes available this week.. or is it the next?
I looked around a bit but wasn't able to find an anything about this yet...
When I enable amb occlusion on my object there is no visible change unless my camera is very close to the object. The closer my camera is to my object the darker it becomes. Is there a way to adjust at what distance the amb occ kicks in or do I need to re-size my object?
Im having the same problem that binopittan was (still is?) having above.
I have a mesh and the yellow light that I added shows up when I have the diffuse and normal map applied but as soon as I tick on the spec map, the light stops working.
It's there, just not lighting anything.
I tested it out on some other meshes and its happening there too, so I know it's not the mesh. I've been using Marmoset for a while and I have never experienced this problem till now. Did the update break something?
I have the same problem on my laptop w. ATI4830M. To show the developers precisely how it doesn't work, there's now a video on youtube. (only for those with the link)
To anyone with the dynamic lighting/specular issues (that we have not emailed yet), it is a shader issue on ATI cards that we discovered with 103. It will be fixed in our free 104 update that will be out later this week.
@nordahl - This is a PSD bug also present in 103 that has been resolved for the upcoming 104 update. If your PSD doesn't have an alpha channel, your map will tile unexpectedly in Toolbag. A workaround for now is a) export a tga or dds b)add a blank alpha channel to your PSD.
You guys have any plans to add animated texture or UVs support? Animated UVs at least could be done in Maya and exported I imagine. Also, perhaps some sort of fresnel map so we could change those values across a single mesh without having to have multiple materials.
Maya 2012 export support? I love me some marmoset, so thank you guys very much.
To anyone with the dynamic lighting/specular issues (that we have not emailed yet), it is a shader issue on ATI cards that we discovered with 103. It will be fixed in our free 104 update that will be out later this week.
@nordahl - This is a PSD bug also present in 103 that has been resolved for the upcoming 104 update. If your PSD doesn't have an alpha channel, your map will tile unexpectedly in Toolbag. A workaround for now is a) export a tga or dds b)add a blank alpha channel to your PSD.
It's coming out this week?! Hot Damn!
I... Love... 8monkey Labs.
I'm having trouble with my wireframes. The character is wearing armor but it shows the wireframe of the body underneath when I fit the entire character on the screen. When I zoom in it displays properly but I have to zoom way in.
Sweet a 1.04 release so soon after 1.03? I'm glad I purchased marmoset last week. This toolbag is really a revelation. Hope there will be a detailed guide for sky map creation in the pdf for the upgrade
( and maybe turntable tga's? People have been asking for such a long time, i can always dream!)
LRoy, i've had several characters with armor and had no issue with wireframe showing correctly. Maybe your wireframe is just too close to the body mesh? You could always export your texture with wires into it to get everything working?
Replies
I'd blame whatever app generated your tangents. It might be Maya, in which case try a different model format. Or it could be xNormal, it generates tangents when it doesn't find any (ex: when using OBJs). And who knows how xNormal handles mirrored geometry. You could also dupe the hand UVs like you have with the shoes.
In maya anytime you flip duplicate and flip a mesh (enter a negative value in either x y or z axis) and then freeze that mesh it inverts the face normals.
To check if this happens
Display -> Polygons -> Face Normals :: If the green lines aren't facing the same direction, there you go.
There are several options and ways to resolve the problem within maya.
The easiest way that seems to work a good chunk of the time (not 100%) is to combine the meshes together, BEFORE freezing transforms.
Other than that there are several options that work in different situations under the Polygons Menu F3 -> Normals
(regardless of the fix in this situation, I suspect it's going to involve rebaking your normal map so it will bake with correct normals.)
Thank you everyone for your help, each suggestion helped me solve my problem.
I'm about 90% sure it was an issue with the way I combined normal maps, I just overlayed them an adjusted the blue channels to about 50% of their value. I came across ncombiner that properly combines normal maps.
Found here:
http://www.planetinaction.com/software/ncombiner.htm
The reason why I'm now sure this was my problem because my original 3 maps worked once combined with ncombiner. The normals issue with the arm was an easy fix, it actually fixed itself when I combined everything into 1 mesh, the normals were all facing outward. I will say though even the arm with the normals issue in marmoset displayed outward facing normals before it was sent to marmoset but perhaps it's just something I'm not really grasping. It's works now.
You can see here the normals are facing the same way.
Normals from the OLD uncombined mesh:
Normals from the New combined mesh:
Again everyone thanks for your help.
Glad you got the issue sorted!
How did you adjust the blue channel? Were there muttiple maps that were overlayed or just one?
I find the fastest way is to double click that layer that is to be overlayed and then simply uncheck the blue there.
I actually pasted all 3 maps together, set the layers to overlay, then adjusted the levels on the blue channel (dropped to 128) for the top two layers then merged down. I'm pretty sure that ended up being the wrong way to do it. It looked fine in Maya but not in Marmoset. I still have a lot to learn about normals and photoshop.
http://vimeo.com/8025133
And you can try nDo for photoshop which can blend normal map too.
(EDIT : Well, I just saw the date of the last post, sorry for this bump)
Are your vert. normals all pointing in the same direction?
@monkeyscience,
I was doing some re-normalisation tests and came across this odd Y shaped artifacts on the top right of each sphere.
The mesh is a flat plane with the Sunlight Sky lighting preset.
Any ideas?
Yes.
I,m using HD 4650 & 3dmax9 btw.
hmm. Did you try flipping the green channel or inverting the Y in Marmoset?
Also the wheels. It looks like it has weird smoothing group issue on it. And the normal looks really jaggy with object space normal=off. Where you can see that nothing really wrong with my normal map and it looks ok with obj space normal=on... (except that it not behave as normal but as a bump /height.)
edit : just tried sample model from marmoset folder. comfy chair etc, they all looks great with and without material applied on them.
Your normal map should compensate for any smoothing issues as long as the mesh that was used to bake the map was identical as the one you using in Marmoset.
If you baked a Tangent Space map, then you should never select Object Space as it will never work correctly (though if you bake an Object Space map, you wont have any smoothing issues as the LP smoothing is ignored)
If you want to send me over the meshes and maps, zip them up and I would be happy to take a look.(HP and LP in .obj please, as i don't use Max or Maya)
Yes i'm using smothing groups and tangent space on my model.
Are you using the latest version of your GPUs drivers? What card do you have?
Im not sure what smoothing groups you had setup, but i just applied basic hard edges along all the UV island edges and it already looks much better. There are still errors in the pic, but unless i know the exact smoothing groups you used for the bake, i cant get around that :P
Can you just please mail me back the corrected mesh
Conclusion i can draw so far :
1. If the corrected mesh rendered on my PC looks the same with screenshot above, then probabbly something wrong with my export setting on 3dmax.
2. If it still looks crap , the problem maybe on my video card, bad ATI driver perhaps ?
HAL this is how i export my model.. am i doing it wrong?
I will mail the mesh back in a sec. (though its far from corrected :P)
1st pic, is the mesh Andy mail me back.. it looks ok.
2nd pic, thats my mesh, this time with with normal tickbox checked on ( from what i,ve tested earlier there is no difference from the result whether th normal tickbox on or off )
3rd pic, the exact same obj used on 2nd pic.. imported to max. aka how it supposed to looks like ( smoothing group wise )
I,m gonna experimenting on various option on exporting my mesh for now.
I,m using max 9, i'd like to know if there is any max 9 user have same issue as mine ?
EDIT : Scratch that.. i,m exporting as FBX. works like charm! finally .. thx everyone XD
Should I be getting these crusty sharp jaggies in all the crevices? It's a 4096x map and those spots look clean on the map.
the texture is just black with the blend mode set to add and it will have a laser type of effect running through it on the texture. Basically faking an alpha card without a needed alpha channel. The SSAO ruins the effect by revealing the two planes
In the skytool in marmoset, i am able to load both those images, the spheres reflectivity and ambient lighting are working, the shadow direction widget seems to indicate correct shadows, but i can't seem to see those spheres casting shadows. Also, in the reflections, it seems like the marmoset can't "wrap" the vertical cross correctly and the reflections show the cross instead of a full environment. The hdr images are loaded as vertical cross in the settings.
Anyway, i go ahead and create the sky, and when i load it up in marmoset, i only get ambient lighting. I tried taking a look into the .env file that is created, and it seems to differ a bit from the preset ones. I tried editing shadow direction on there, didn't do a thing.
I've also tried changing the vertical cross cubemaps generated from HDRShop into .dds cubemap from the old ATI cube map generator software, and if i do that, when i throw the maps into the skytool, i get a system freeze.
Sorry for the lengthy post, but i've been really excited lately to try to create my own sky environments in marmoset... so if anyone has successfully created one, i'd love to get some directions and help?
also.. where do i see the days remaining before the trial expired?
Now i have another trouble understanding how lights in Marmoset works.
Here is my tank with Riverside Ambience light.. i add another red lightbulb with max intensity just for the test. Strange.. nothing seems to change.
And then i get my specular map disabled, and bam! the light is there.. So what exacly this is means? I can't use another light if my model have specular map on it?
Using latest toolbag, and 6990 with latest drivers, and win7 64.
This all works fine at home on my 470 (same models, displacements etc), unfortunately the only dx11 system I have at work is with this ati card. Ever seen this or know of any fix for it?
*****swapped in a 480 instead, problems solved
I have a mesh and the yellow light that I added shows up when I have the diffuse and normal map applied but as soon as I tick on the spec map, the light stops working.
It's there, just not lighting anything.
I tested it out on some other meshes and its happening there too, so I know it's not the mesh. I've been using Marmoset for a while and I have never experienced this problem till now. Did the update break something?
1)As ceebee already pointed out, for maximum range of lighting you will want to use HDR images for your source. If you don't have HDR images handy, or not too comfortable generating your own in Photoshop, standard 8-bit images will work, the final exported environment just wont be *as* pretty.
2) More importantly, if you are generating custom lighting environments and you want shadows, you will need to have 2 source images in your sky tool: "light image" and "shadow image". The shadow image is what will determine the direction of the sun/light. If a custom shadow image is not loaded, your environment will be ambient light only. The Toolbag User Manual has a further explanation of the shadow image and how to create it.
*GOOD NEWS* We do have an in-depth Sky Tool tutorial releasing to the public later this week.
@MrHobo & @binopittan - please email us with your system specs (especially GPU), screenshots w/ your 'Light' tab and 'Mat' tab visible, and a rundown of what you're doing when the spec and dynamic lights start not playing nicely. We're not having much luck repro'ing it here.
@getawesome13: The shadow direction widget shows that it is reading the sun light direction correctly, and I do have both shadow and light images. Can any full version of photoshop generate HDRs (I have CS4)? If so, how do I save the images as such?
Also what is the minimum amount of brightness separation that should be used for the cubemaps, between the sun and the next brightest non-sun, non-main-lighting pixel?
Im having the same problem as you Either.Ardrey (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1371350&postcount=589)
My shadow direction is reading correctly in the skytool, and all my images are HDR (32 bit) and I only seem to get ambient lighting and no shadow. I've tried everything possible that I could think of and Im totally stuck.
@getawesome13, I cannot wait until a detailed tutorial to creating your own sky environment becomes available this week.. or is it the next?
When I enable amb occlusion on my object there is no visible change unless my camera is very close to the object. The closer my camera is to my object the darker it becomes. Is there a way to adjust at what distance the amb occ kicks in or do I need to re-size my object?
Thanks in advance!
I have the same problem on my laptop w. ATI4830M. To show the developers precisely how it doesn't work, there's now a video on youtube. (only for those with the link)
http://youtu.be/PQ48jhoGeJg
Edit: nevermind, converted the .psd into .tga and it's fixed.
@nordahl - This is a PSD bug also present in 103 that has been resolved for the upcoming 104 update. If your PSD doesn't have an alpha channel, your map will tile unexpectedly in Toolbag. A workaround for now is a) export a tga or dds b)add a blank alpha channel to your PSD.
Maya 2012 export support?
It's coming out this week?! Hot Damn!
I... Love... 8monkey Labs.
( and maybe turntable tga's? People have been asking for such a long time, i can always dream!)
LRoy, i've had several characters with armor and had no issue with wireframe showing correctly. Maybe your wireframe is just too close to the body mesh? You could always export your texture with wires into it to get everything working?