Hello, I modell in Blender and want to bake with xNormal.
However I always get ugly seams where my UV seams ( and hard edges) are.
What I do:
1.) Set the Lopo up correctly so that it looks right when smoothed
2.) Break the UVs on the hard edges and place them a little bit away from each other
3.) Load the Hipo and Lopo up in XNormal
4.) Get this result
Baking in Blender doesnt change this error.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/201/gaddee.png/
Replies
Now, I did a test and the same meshes give a great result in 3ds max while beeing broken in Xnormal and Blender.
Obviously I set up the proper tangent basis for each.
Maybe this has to do with way how set up "smoothing groups" in Blender altogether.
The difference between 3ds max's bake and others wasn't that big on the other hand
and note that you'll always have some artifacts from a very short distance.
As to the cage in Xnormal I've had some hard time trying to get a hold of it but
now it seems pretty intuitive just remember to use "save meshes" in the viewer otherwise the cage is not set i think.
Max uses an averaged projection mesh(cage) unless you specifically turn it off(use offset).
Xnormal by default uses a simple ray distance from the mesh normals, which like blender results in split normals along your hard edges. You can set up(in the 3d viewer) or import a custom cage mesh in xnormal though.
read this entire thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154
Unfortunately I do not know if there is any way to get an averaged projection mesh in blender, or if you can even export a custom cage without split edges to use with XN from blender. I would suggest simply using Max or Maya to bake, or at the very least to set up your cage and export it to XN.
When you install Xnormal it installs a Max plugin so you can export in .SBM(xnormal format) and includes options for exporting the cage. I assume there is a similar plugin for Maya but I haven't used it.
Xnormal has an option to load an external (obj or whatever) cage file too, but the vertex index has to match up, so I'm not sure you can do that straight out of blender.