Maya - Normal maps triangle errors
polycounter lvl 9
See what you make of these screen shots. I'm getting annoying little triangles in my normal maps when using Maya's transfer maps (xnormals isn't being much help either). I've softened the normals before transferring and so I'm not sure what it is. I know it's generally wise to avoid long triangles but some of these triangles aren't at all long or thin.
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I'm making sure I get this solved before I move it to UDK because these kinds of errors often can look 10 times worse in the engine.
Huge thanks in advance to any that can help.
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I'm making sure I get this solved before I move it to UDK because these kinds of errors often can look 10 times worse in the engine.
Huge thanks in advance to any that can help.
Replies
Thanks, Chai. Oh how I wanted for that to be solution but I've had a good look around the model and I can't find any sneaky stray verts.
As I went around it I noticed that any triangle is resulting in the error. Grr - I just want to get this model finished.
Hmm, well I know it can happen on long thin triangles but, upon closer inspection, I'm getting it wherever there's any triangle in the model.
I very much hate those small triangles too... :poly127:
Because you're not using any hard edges, this is going to look quite bad in UDK. Maya's tangent bias is synced up between its renderer and display, however UDK is not synced to maya's tangent basis. A good general practice is to use hard edges along your uvs seams.
You should set hard edges along your uvs, rebake and then try this out in UDK asap. Chances are you'll need to do even more changes, IE: adjust your uvlayout to account for even more hard edges. You need to have uv splits everywhere you have hard edges otherwise you will get "black edge" artifacts there.
The existing normal map on there was already 2048 x 2048, but as you suggested, I've also now tried it at 4096, and with hardened edges along my UV borders. Didn't help.
I will play around a bit more with what you've suggested and test it in UDK. Hmm, but I'm still not sure if what you've mentioned is what the problem is though.
As you can see in the shots below, it's happening all over the model, regardless of UV space/resolution - even if I go the other extreme and harden all edges and do a transfer map.
Update:
There has been something strange happening with the envelope in transfer maps. With all other models, the transfer maps envelope behaves correctly and scales up and down when the 'search envelope %' slider is moved, but when used with this particular geometry, it won't update. This only happens with this particular piece of geometry.
The UVs seem fine to me. I've tested it with various UV layouts to check. It very much does seem that there must be an error in the geometry. It's as if there's a problem with its normals; not the actual normal map but the geometry's normals.
I don't think the normals are locked (Normals>Lock Normals), as I've selected 'Unlock Normals' several times to be sure.