Weird smoothing/normal map error

Tavor

I'm doing a piece right now and I've hit a snag (3DS Max, 3Point Shader, normal map applied):





I've moved the vertex in several spots to get it to work to no avail. What's weirder is, if I apply symmetry without welding verts, that error disppears and something else reappears. Any ideas? I'm stumped. I've also tried welding stray verts and edges, looked at the cage (found nothing obvious), and upped the iterations on turbosmooth to 3; none of that worked. I feel like I'm missing something simple/obvious.

Mik2121

You should show us the normal map itself too..

Did you have different smoothing groups when you baked the high poly normal?

Tavor

Here is the normal map:



I put a couple of smoothing groups on the object, but the surface where the error appears only has one.

DarkStar

have you tryed to edit your triangle? theres a option to edit them when your in polygone and its called turn!

AlecMoody

you should get a clean result if you manually triangulate everything, rebake, and then don't move your verts.

Tavor

I tried both those methods as well as going to vert mode and hitting the "Connect" button. I may have made it a bit better, but that error is still there. Out of curiousity, why should retriangulating work?

EarthQuake

There are basically two reasons people suggest triangulating your mesh:

A. Max can give unreliable results, ei: Ignore your "invisible edge" orientation on quads and use the opposite, this generally will result in a distinct "X" shaped smoothing error, as the edge in the bake is running against the edge in the mesh.

B. When a mesh is triangulated for export, the mesh normals map change. This depends on your exporter generally, a good exporter should freeze the mesh normals before triangulation.

So, are you using Quality Mode normals in 3pshader? If not, this could just be basic max-crappyness.

Also, make sure that you're rebaking after every change to your mesh, if you move some verts around, or change your smoothing groups, this alters your mesh normals and you will need to rebake.

JonathanL

You can try converting it to an editable mesh and then back to an editable poly. I don't know why but that has helped solve smoothing anomalies for me in the past.

Tavor

Thanks for the tips; I really appreciate it. I tried using turn once again. I rebaked with the edit, and, again, got marginally better results. I did switch on Quality Normals mode, but that didn't do anything.

After all that, I exported to the UDK, ran lightmass, and it worked. So, I guess it was a Max issue.

AlecMoody

did you put the quality normals modifier onto your object?