Normal map seam
polycounter lvl 13
Yes, like thousand of others i have a problem with my normal map. I cant
understand why i have this seam (No black seam btw). Every smoothing group has its own uv-shell, but
it doesn't blend well, only on a few sides ? I have tryed some variations,
in the first picture i unwrapped the cylinder+cap for a big shell with the same smoothing group ( This is what auto smooth gives me). The problem is that you
can see the triangulation and where i cut the cylinder. In the second picture
i gave the cap a different smoothing group and its own uv-shell. But it looks worse.
Anyone knows what to do in that case???
understand why i have this seam (No black seam btw). Every smoothing group has its own uv-shell, but
it doesn't blend well, only on a few sides ? I have tryed some variations,
in the first picture i unwrapped the cylinder+cap for a big shell with the same smoothing group ( This is what auto smooth gives me). The problem is that you
can see the triangulation and where i cut the cylinder. In the second picture
i gave the cap a different smoothing group and its own uv-shell. But it looks worse.
Anyone knows what to do in that case???
Replies
NBLM, you've got the Ye Olde Cylinder Cappe problem. See this thread...
Normal Map problem that has been bothering me for ages!
I think he has two problems going on, the classic wave issue. Not much can be done short of a few hack fixes and better planning.
And then the smoothing group issue. Which is giving him a seam.
I think all but a handful of engines will break smoothing at UV seams giving you an edge but even with those engines it still looks better to feed it a normal map without the seam baked in.
Of course its always a good idea to plan out your seams and even design in places to hide them so you're not caught with your pants down when you start baking...
Scanline rendering.
No crazy viewport hardware shader.
If this model is meant just to be viewed in the Max viewport, and nowhere else, then bake with one Smoothing Group, and use 3Point Studios' shader. Or if for Scanline rendering, then use a Standard material with a Normal Bump map.
However if the model is meant to be exported to another real-time rendering system, like UDK or Crysis or Marmoset or whatever... or it's meant to be used with some other Max viewport shader... then re-bake with the Smoothing Group seams matching the UV shell seams.
The workflow has to be different, depending on the rendering method.
I'll have to test it all out when UDK finishes downloading.
Any other combo simply doesn't work, you get weird gradients baked into the normal map, and the unsynched shader can't solve them.
3Point's shader is one of very few real-time shaders that are synched perfectly with Max's RTT baker. In fact, I know of no other shader or game engine at this point that uses the same tangent basis method as Max's RTT.
With a properly synched solution, one can make hard edges on the lowpoly model, separate the corresponding UV chunks, and get a perfectly smoothed realtime look with no hard edge showing. It has the benefit of producing very nice and flat tangent space maps, avoiding potential 'diagonal shading' errors (meaning, it becomes less important to triangulate everything).
Its likely not gonna work in UDK anyways, since to my knowledge it still recalculates normals on mesh import.
It looked really familiar too, it explained how to get nicely smoothed gradients over hard edged geometry. So yea I remembered it could be done just forgot the specifics.
It's funny because I my original post I put "or ask EQ, he sets me straight all the time on this crap" but then took it out.
I thought UDK was synced to Scanline since Epic mostly uses Max (if I remember correctly) which is why I didn't trust any fancy pants shaders. The 3point shader worked great but I don't use it all that often and haven't installed it since I built the new machine.
I couldn't get it working in UDK but I only ran two tests broken and unified. Seams even popped up when I broke it and baked but I might have run into a padding issue or its recalculating the normals like Pior said? If that's the case, does that mean you can't edit the normals? As in using Normal Thief on foliage? If so, that blows, they need to get that in ASAP...
So in the case of engines like UDK not picking up the normals, I guess he should probably add an edge for the indent and planar map the front crap all the way back to that new edge so he can hide the seam in there? Or will it actually smooth fine in UDK and look like garbage everywhere else?
I'll have to test it out in 3point and UDK some other day when I get some time.
The waviness is almost gone after i adjusted the cage.
The seam is rock my world. I thought if i set my UV shells accordingly to the
smoothing group it will give me a nice soft edge, but thats a joke or what , there will be always a seam that i must hide?
I have done this what Vig said, and it seems to work.
Btw. i am using Xoliul's shader at the moment, and i want it to export it to marmoset later.
"is rock my world"... do you mean it's solved? Maybe this is an English idiom that has been lost in translation.
Yes, without a perfect synch between baker and shader, you will usually have some artifacts. Often these seams become much less obvious when you add diffuse and specular maps, so the lesser normal map problems can be ignored. Depends on how smooth it needs to look.
A crucial piece of information. This is a good thing to state in the first post, the next time you start a thread. You'll get quicker help this way!
me that hint. I am not a native speaker.
Yeah, sorry about that. I forgot it.
Thats a good message. :-)
I will now go ahead and start to unwrapping the whole gun.
If someone interested you can see my
progress in the ingram mac 11 thread.
Thank you all!
If you say "the seam rocked my world", this usually means "the seam made me the happiest I could be".
In general, it isn't helpful to use idioms in another language unless you are really familiar with them. English is painful enough as it is!