normal maps, i have never made one right.
polygon
seriously, am i completely inept? i have tried so many times to make a decent normal map and it always comes out with errors!
is it just the nature of the beast? do normal maps always require tons of redoing and a headache?
on the bright side, my constant researching has lead to my learning lots of new things but, for christs sake, just work! just one time, just work like the first or second pass.
the disp maps in zb seem to work fine for me. i honestly think i have some sort of normal map learning disability or something. sigh, /rant.
is it just the nature of the beast? do normal maps always require tons of redoing and a headache?
on the bright side, my constant researching has lead to my learning lots of new things but, for christs sake, just work! just one time, just work like the first or second pass.
the disp maps in zb seem to work fine for me. i honestly think i have some sort of normal map learning disability or something. sigh, /rant.
Replies
What app do you use?
I did struggle with normal maps for a long time, but when i changed from modo to 3ds max it worked out
that way it's easier to help you with, and people with similar issues can find your thread for help as well.
if you are on 3dsmax, then there is this viewport display issue that will not show them correctly in real-time viewports (unless using the quality mode fix, see http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72861)
What, the hand-authoring in grayscale and converting to tangent space? It's perfectly acceptable for hard-surface work. We used it extensively on FlightSim 10/11, and it's much more time-efficient than modeling tiny nuts and bolt that aren't going to be more than a few pixels anyway.
It has its drawbacks, but it's an extremely useful tool in the toolbox. Having a library of small grayscale surface details you can crazybump onto a baselayer baked normal is VERY useful, and fast.
Completely avoiding such a technique would be a huge waste. Take chipping paint on metal for example. It is much easier to make a normal map generated from grayscale, than actually sculpting the chipping paint.
So the way i see it he have problem with normal map baking, so making the whole map in photoshop wouldnt be the best idea, but would be nice if the topic starter could show us some images soon
...this is very true. Pictures help.
So, the same things that are very quick to do, like having a library of bolts and pasting them on, are just as easy to do in 3d, and often times you can use even better tools, like instancing evenly spaced bolts on a spline in a 3d app, instead of hand placing 57 little bolts in photoshop....
It's real headache to work around problems when it takes you a few minutes just to prepare and bake everything.
For example xnormal is a good app because you can prepare all the settings once, and then it's just one click to do bakes. (even if you change those models)
From modo I use my pipeline IO script which is basically the same idea, I click one button and it updates the lowpoly models, cages, etc ...
And on top of that there are a lot of packages which let you preview normals in realtime. (for example max)
So at the end it takes me two clicks to bake a normalmap, then just alt-tab to my viewing app and I can technically see results in almost realtime.
Over the years you become more used to the normalmap dingo, but I still find previewing essential so I can focus on work.
Did you turn off the blue channel on the overlay layer, duplicate the layer, set it to multiply, and turn off everything except for the blue channel?
yes, there's a thread somewhere where Ryan shows how the Photoshop method is incorrect.
As far as getting errors and what not, it's mostly down to your low poly and/or how you layout your UVs. I'm still new at it myself but one thing I've learned is: use Xnormal.