Mesh completely black when Normal Map is applied
polycounter lvl 9
I don't know if this has to do with the difference in number of sides between the low and high poly. The base of my barrel has 12 sides so it's pretty blocky, but the high poly has at least 40 sides with turbosmooth slapped on. Is there a point where Normal Maps are ineffective when wanting to bake the rounded edges? I'm more likely just not baking correctly because when I apply the map in 3ds Max to the low mesh the whole thing turns black. Do I need to split the UV islands where there are different smoothing groups? Is it a cage issue? I'm soooooo confused 
Replies
When I placed the Normal Map in the Bump Material Slot it loads perfectly.
I know the Normals need to be cleaned up in PS.
Is there anything I could do for a cleaner bake? Adjust the cage? Add more detail to the low poly since right now it's just a straight tube. Someone I know recommended not doing a Normal for a trash can as the texture would cost more then just adding smoothing groups to the low poly, but I think it'll look better with a Normal Map.
Personally I would just create the normal map inside photoshop. It's a simple enough model, and you're doing the cleanup in photoshop anyway. Use nDo. In this case it's about as simple as drawing some lines and running the nDo script.
Also, don't bake and preview your normals maps in RT shaders, select a clean normal map during your bake and apply your baked map afterwards it done baking, Max, especially 2012 has a nasty habit of keeping OLD 'baking' version of a Map, which look broken in the memory, to which the only solution is restarting Max.