3Ds Max 4096 Normals seen as 1024

Rock Bottom

Hey guys i need some help my 3Ds Max is Rendering all funny after i formatted my PC and tried to render to texture a model and after render i applied it to my Mesh and it was on extreme low res only a few parts were ok but other were extremely low i baked it at 4096 x 4096 and it was Crap.
My recent baked Normals Map is a lot brighter than the ones i used to bake.
I also tried to see a few models that i had done earlier to adjust and applied its normal map and it was on really low res but the normal map is 4096 x 4096. i tryed changing settings in Viewport but nothing. please help
apparently i cant upload images.

Farfarer

Customise > Preferences > Viewports > Configure Driver...

In Background Texture Size and Download Texture Size, select 1024 and 512 respectively, and ensure you tick "Math Bitmap Size as Closely as Possible" for each.

Save that and restart Max, see if that helps.



It could also be a limitation on your graphics card if that does't work.

Neox

you don't have to restart max, just reopen the scene to reset the driversettings

Revel

If I'm not mistaken you also need to Run As Admin for allowing Max to "save" that setting, so you won't have to go to the driver setting every time you want to view your texture in viewport!

_Revel

Xoliul

If you use a viewportshader like mine, it ignores the Driver settings. Though 4096 is really, really big and you will probably get into trouble if your spec and diffuse are also that size.

Rock Bottom

@ Talon: i did as u said and it fixed 1 problem but i still have another 1 unfortunately i cant upload images to any site for some crappy reason so i cant show you the problem.
@ Ravel: I use XP.
@ Xoliul: I only make my map that size so i get great quality and then i resize it to 1024 x 1024.

Neox

@ Xoliul: I only make my map that size so i get great quality and then i resize it to 1024 x 1024.

change the sampling, rendering bigger and scaling down won't give you better quality

DOG-GY

Rock Bottom wrote: »

@ Xoliul: I only make my map that size so i get great quality and then i resize it to 1024 x 1024.

I know it's partly an opinion thing but I'm dead set against resizing maps unless it's absolutely necessary. If you're mainly hand painting it or you're working with something like normals I think it's best to work at the final resolution as you can have blurring or interpolation problems, as well as not having enough padding.

Rock Bottom

hmm well if you guys put it that way i guess you are right. So raising the Padding makes lower map sizes look better? Noob question

DataCain

Rock Bottom wrote: »

So raising the Padding makes lower map sizes look better? Noob question

It helps to prevent lighting artifacts from occurring at seams.
In particular this happens with mip-maps and even manual resizing of an image from the down sampling.

Padding stretches the edges of your normal map outwards so when the image is down sampled it doesn't draw on 'empty' pixels which can cause lighting artifacts. Padding is also good to stop the artifacts on the full size image where the unwrap edges might cut through pixels that have missed being baked\painted.

It's kinda like an Anti-Aliasing for textures.

Xoliul

I gotta stick with Rock Bottom here: rendering a map out at larger resolution and scaling it down does give you better quality. Scaling a 4096 to 1024 essentially gives you a 1024 with 4x multisampling. You have to make sure to control the resampling though, and you have to keep in mind you will be scaling your padding as well (4px padding on 4096 becomes 1px on 1024).

That said, I would avoid doing it on maps that are not generated by RTT; handpainted diffuse won't really benefit (it'll easily deteriorate even). This method is really just a way to combat aliasing, noise and other artifacts.

Rock Bottom

ok so in conclusion baking a 4096 map and lowering it to 1024 with Bicubic Sharper in photoshop works? good? is it also ok to reduce and then make the difuse map?

Neox

Xoliul wrote: »

I gotta stick with Rock Bottom here: rendering a map out at larger resolution and scaling it down does give you better quality. Scaling a 4096 to 1024 essentially gives you a 1024 with 4x multisampling. You have to make sure to control the resampling though, and you have to keep in mind you will be scaling your padding as well (4px padding on 4096 becomes 1px on 1024).

That said, I would avoid doing it on maps that are not generated by RTT; handpainted diffuse won't really benefit (it'll easily deteriorate even). This method is really just a way to combat aliasing, noise and other artifacts.

so why not from the start use sampling methods for the targetresolution?
i somewhat doubt that baking without AA and scaling it down will gice you the same results as just using sampling for the bake at final res.

Xoliul

Neox wrote: »

so why not from the start use sampling methods for the targetresolution?
i somewhat doubt that baking without AA and scaling it down will gice you the same results as just using sampling for the bake at final res.

hah yeah I agree man, but some apps just don't have adequate enough sampling. If you're using max, then hammersley at 1.0 should be perfect, but other apps (or renderengines even, like MR) might not fare so well. I used FAOgen for some AO textures recently: there is no AA supersampling there, so the only way to get rid of jaggies is to render at the max resolution and downscale.