xNormal and Blender use the same tangents, so he might as well go with xNormal, but I don't see why he would do that since he won't be able to show the model without seams.
Keep it in Max, keep it scanline, best advice so far.
xNormal and Blender use the same tangents, so he might as well go with xNormal, but I don't see why he would do that since he won't be able to show the model without seams.
Exactly. I've baked in ZBrush before too, but the seams that show when you render in Max make it effectively useless.
Switching the max display driver back to DX9, OpenGL or software mode clears up a lot misc issues for a lot of people.
I've been running DX9 viewports for a day now, and the weird randomly-occurring issue's still around. I have a couple more specifics about it - I can't alter the selection in the viewport, but I can via the selection tab on the ribbon. When I try and bandbox-select in the viewport, wherever I start it from, it seems to think I'm clicking on the gizmo - so if Select&Move is enabled, for instance, it would move vertices rather than start a drag-selection box, even if I start the click&drag in empty space.
Exceptionally annoying.
Edit: I've noticed that in these situations the whole gizmo remains highlighted, wherever in the viewport I move the cursor to - as if it's lost the connection between cursor and viewport, and so just assumes the cursor is on the gizmo. Oh and even just a save/load fixes it, it doesn't require a full Max restart.
Mental ray is a disaster when it comes to baking normal maps.
It messes up the padding, it incorrectly assigns the background as the environment color even when the correct color is set as the "background" in RTT. It also takes longer and unless you crank up the Final Gather settings which increases the render time it will spit out worse results that are blurry.
You also can run into a crash issue if you jump between mental ray and scanline too often in the same session...
About the only thing mental ray can do is bake AO... which is a bit of a gamble because it also fudges up the padding. Just about everyone I know uses scanline, its fast, efficient and works great. A lot of people use a custom light setup and bake AO in scanline also, I know I've had to resort to that when MentalRay won't create the AO correctly or doesn't give me the control I want.
If you're going to spend some CPU cycles on a higher end rendering engine, I would choose Vray, but even then what you get isn't really worth the time spent.
I have the same problems with mental ray. Also, the last time I tried vray it didn't work well with projections. I used to use vray dirt for low poly AO and it was awesome.
Rob:
I have a complete asset workflow series on 3dmotive and it has a heavy focus on baking.
Replies
Keep it in Max, keep it scanline, best advice so far.
Exactly. I've baked in ZBrush before too, but the seams that show when you render in Max make it effectively useless.
I've been running DX9 viewports for a day now, and the weird randomly-occurring issue's still around. I have a couple more specifics about it - I can't alter the selection in the viewport, but I can via the selection tab on the ribbon. When I try and bandbox-select in the viewport, wherever I start it from, it seems to think I'm clicking on the gizmo - so if Select&Move is enabled, for instance, it would move vertices rather than start a drag-selection box, even if I start the click&drag in empty space.
Exceptionally annoying.
Edit: I've noticed that in these situations the whole gizmo remains highlighted, wherever in the viewport I move the cursor to - as if it's lost the connection between cursor and viewport, and so just assumes the cursor is on the gizmo. Oh and even just a save/load fixes it, it doesn't require a full Max restart.
I have the same problems with mental ray. Also, the last time I tried vray it didn't work well with projections. I used to use vray dirt for low poly AO and it was awesome.
Rob:
I have a complete asset workflow series on 3dmotive and it has a heavy focus on baking.
http://www.3dmotive.com/
Sounds like exactly what I need, thanks! I'll give that a look in the morning.