Newbie needs help with Normal maps!

Barnaby

Hey all, first time posting here, and also my first time making a highpoly model and baking it onto a lowpoly. Basically I'm completely confused - I've been following the tutorial "How to bake a flawless Normal Map" on CGTuts, getting advice from friends who have done it before, or who are on the same course as me and have already normal mapped their models, I've looked at the polycount wiki, I've tried google searching for help... but I can't see anyone with the same issue as me anywhere. Here's what my normal map looks like:



Horrendous I know, and I have no idea why it's doing this. Originally I thought maybe it was because I accidentally left some lights in the scene, but nope. I also tried resetting the xforms on the lowpoly tank. Here's a picture of the scene in Max (I'm using 2012, but I originally began modelling in 2011 - I hope that's not the issue, I was kinda forced to switch to 2012 when I needed to use Max on my laptop, and students.autodesk has gotten rid of 2011 for 2012.):



On the left is the renderout as it appears in Max.

Thanks for any help. This is due in tomorrow so I'm panicking a bit!

reality4

Your normal map is rendered in world space, you should use tangent space (assuming you want to use it in a game environment). And if you're unhappy with the way your tank is unwrapped I can advice you to use XRayunwrap (http://www.raylightgames.com/xrayunwrap/index.html)

leechdemon

The Normal Map doesn't look like a World Space map to me, actually; there's a lot of "Magic Blue" (127,127,255) and related colors in patches, but the pinks and greens look like ray misses. Are you baking this in Max or someplace else (xNormals, etc)? If in Max, did you reset/push the threshold on your Projection modifier? (or use a cage in xNormals?

Will Faucher

reality4 wrote: »

Your normal map is rendered in world space, you should use tangent space (assuming you want to use it in a game environment). And if you're unhappy with the way your tank is unwrapped I can advice you to use XRayunwrap (http://www.raylightgames.com/xrayunwrap/index.html)

Yeah that definitely is not a World Space Normal map. Are you trying to bake everything in one piece? I would explode the mesh when it comes to baking.

leechdemon

Prophecies wrote: »

Yeah that definitely is not a World Space Normal map. Are you trying to bake everything in one piece? I would explode the mesh when it comes to baking.

Oh, yeah, Collisions could totally cause that. Most normal mapping tutorials seem to be for characters, but vehicles tend to have WAY more collisions based on all the extra surfaces, so the use of exploding meshes is often overlooked (imo). Good call.

Barnaby

Hey guys, thanks for the answers. Unfortunately this was approved by a moderator after my deadline, but hey, it'll help for the future. Anyways, my first thought was that it might have been creating an Object/World space normal map, but I checked and made sure it was set to Tangent space. I'm 99.9% sure these errors are caused by overlaps, but I didn't have enough time to explode everything. I'll do it in my own time at somepoint, but I might practice on an easier model first.

And yeah I was using 3ds Max 2012 to do this.