The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
3DS Max Trouble - Normal Maps Broken
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Replies
Also i think you're misunderstanding the way a normal map works, it doesn't change the geometry, all it does is give the illusion of extra geometry when interacting with a light source.
There is tons of normal mapping resources in the wiki. http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29
On the other hand, anything 'inside' modeled is perfectly fine on any scale. Anything which is 'pushed in' and cannot be read from the silhouette since it's not trying to put fake information, and baked to a normal map will show correctly, but again, it needs to Beveled to be read correctly.
An example of what I mean:
Everything that has a certain amount outside modeling is modeled, and anything that doesn't need to pop out as much, like say the gas cylinders on the chest (like the pads having those small grooves) are fined to be baked since the information transfer is more logical.
If you wanted that thing to POP out more, in the outside bevel on the pads, you'll need to create a Relief/Parallax Map shader, however, it's too expensive and the performance hit is not worth it since you're simply getting a mesh to show up something which would be cheaper to model. Plus, I don't think Source would support it for TF2 naturally.
All in all, you simply needs to know when to bake. Anything which (in my case) is maybe 1CM outside the model, could be baked, anything which requires a little more and is a clearly breaking of the silhouette on a bigger scale (like your box) would require and is much better off modeled.
Some people will say otherwise, but the idea is simply how big that item is going to be and how close the player is going to get to it.
Use a directX material, and apply a shader that uses normal maps. I like xoliul's shader: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62006
Also, your bake is a little jacked. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but if your going to have a hard edge on your model (like the edges of a cube for example), I don't think you want soft edges there. The variation in color on your boxes shouldn't be there. It should be solid blue.
If this extrusion is a large shape for the model, and should add to the silhouette of the model...just model it. Normal maps ore better suited to smaller details.
Also, I never modeled for TF2, so I don't know anything about this, but a new school of thought is that modeling stuff is simply 'cheaper' then having a large normal map which has extremely tiny details on which you need large maps sized to get a clean bake. Plus, materials add alot of weight to a model ingame, (in reference to UDK) so there is that to remember.
Ask as much as you like on PC, we're here to help after all.
gsokol: Depends, most people will bevel/chamfer the model to avoid such issues. Generally, a single smoothing group bake is all you need, as 16bit said, in other cases, you need to break them based upon UV islands.
This all depends on the application you're using, in Max, I generally had an easy time with single smooth bakes.