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Weird Max Baking Texture Normals and All.

polycounter lvl 18
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oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
Yea. Unsure whats causing this. Reset the xform on all. The cage is far enough. Is it the scale of the object possibly (ie my object space)? Shouldn't be because I baked other objects in same system (cm) with no issues that were smaller.

Any tools in Max Im ignorant about that would highlight problem areas?

Here is the weird part. It ONLY shows up when I turn on supersampling. If I have it off it doesn't show. But of course the resulting normal map isn't nearly as smooth.
scanline_super.png

Trying Mental Ray gives some weird results as well.
mental.png

Here is sample of scene showing cage distance.
layout.png

Clues? Something obvious Im forgetting (this is Max 2011)?

Xnormal does a decent enough job but I dont use it much for normal maps these days since it does a terrible job at hiding UV islands. However, look at the cavity map it created...
nn_cavity.jpg

Its picking up the faces of the high rez. Even though the high rez was exported as smoothed normals (and it was one smoothing group). I tried a sbm and a obj and still same.
WTF?

If you want a look at the original file. LMK though PM individually. Dont want to share totally since game asset.

Replies

  • Ben Apuna
    Weird problem...

    If it only shows up with super sampling on then I suggest just leaving it off and render out your texture at 8X the resolution and resize in Photoshop.
  • Mark Dygert
    Max2008 or lower? I remember that being an issue with the Global Super Sampling setting, I think it would disapear if you set it to something like Hamersley. I'm pretty sure it was fixed in 2009 or 2010. Ben brings up a good idea too. If all else fails... xNormal!
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    Good idea about just making it 4x larger Ben!

    Mark,

    I did try a different sampler with same results. Its also 2011. Xnormal did it fine, except xnormal isn't very good at hiding uv island breaks. Jogshy is aware of it.

    With the cavity map. It gets weirder. I created a AO in Xnormal after that, and it looked fine.
  • Ben Apuna
    Oops! poly136.gif Yeah 4X is what I meant not the 8X I mentioned earlier.

    You want to down sample 4 pixels into 1 pixel, so a 256 result would require a 1024 bake.
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