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Problem with normals,

Hi everybody, i have some problems with normal mapping. I am tryind to do some kind on armour, and I am baking normals of every part seperately (like boots, goves an so on). So, when i try to apply normals to the copy of the same mesh he gives me a lot of noise. For example, when I made a lowpoly human with normals (baked in maya) and transfered it to UDK it was perfect, but the human is in one piace of cource, so i dont need to combine different normal maps. 123jpg_6522332_10246116.jpg What i must do? Help please.

So basically the steps I think to do to make game character
1) make hi-poly
2) retopo all parts separately
3) unwrap every object (like gloves, armour, boots)
4) pack all UV in one texture
5) seperately bake all parts of character
6) take all normal maps, open photoshop and combine in one big normal map
7) combine all meshes in one character
8) and os on...

am I doing everything right or not?

Replies

  • Eric Chadwick
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    The steps are correct. Although it looks like you are using a bad texture format. It is best to bake to a 16 bits-per-channel format. Then convert it down to 8 bpc when you're done processing it.
  • Bartalon
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    Bartalon polycounter lvl 12
    It looks like you are using Maya to preview your normals. If that's the case, then make sure you have your bump channel set as Tangent Space Normals and not just a simple Bump.

    Also make sure that any UV borders are hard edges on your model before you bake normals or you'll get less than dodgy results along your seams.
  • Daedalus51
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    Daedalus51 polycounter lvl 5
    I had this issue once, too. This happens because (i guess) you just added them together, so at one point you have so many overlaying layers, that this noise appears. This is also the reason why its not there if you bake on a single texture.

    Try baking each map with its uv shells in an alpha channel, overlay all the maps with your preferred way of doing it and then mask them of by your uv shells (each layer seperately)

    That should do the trick ;)
  • Bnopnia
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    Thank you guys! Changing to Tangent Space Normals really helped! This was a big headache for me. Thank you again =)
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