what is wrong with my normal map?!
I've been reading stuffs about normal map in this forum and trying to understand about how tangent being calculated differently resulting artifact, and I wanted to relate the knowledge to how xnormal never worked well for me when I'm doing hardsurfaces(with character it's usually ok).
But it must had given me brain damage or something because I just did some test in Maya 2011 and found I almost didn't know how to work with normalmap at all. I baked a map using one lowpoly, it was ok, and I tried to triangulate the mesh to export to xnormal to bake and compare, but before that I wanted to use the triangulated mesh to bake in maya again just so it can compare with xnormal fairly cos the same mesh. But I can never bake a good map again once the mesh is triangulated, the result maps looked just like what I always got from xnormal. Then I rendered both the original mesh and triangulated mesh with mental ray, found the first one that looked proper in viewport now as screwed as the triangulated mesh.
(black background render is from mental ray. both mesh using all soft edges.)
How did this happen and how I can just get a decent normal map working?
But it must had given me brain damage or something because I just did some test in Maya 2011 and found I almost didn't know how to work with normalmap at all. I baked a map using one lowpoly, it was ok, and I tried to triangulate the mesh to export to xnormal to bake and compare, but before that I wanted to use the triangulated mesh to bake in maya again just so it can compare with xnormal fairly cos the same mesh. But I can never bake a good map again once the mesh is triangulated, the result maps looked just like what I always got from xnormal. Then I rendered both the original mesh and triangulated mesh with mental ray, found the first one that looked proper in viewport now as screwed as the triangulated mesh.
(black background render is from mental ray. both mesh using all soft edges.)
How did this happen and how I can just get a decent normal map working?
Replies
-Delete all by type/history
-Freeze transformations,
-select object, normals/Unlock normals
-select all faces, normals/set to faces
-select all faces, smooth normals
-select object, triangulate,
then do your bakes. Should work fine now
Also, does doing these normal operation on object level make a difference? Cos you said select all faces... I actually did all that the first time before triangulating, but on object level tho.
OK now baking is fine in the viewport, but the mental ray is still rendering the same thing--is that normal?