Big Awful Artifacts in my Normal Maps.
Hello Everybody,
My name is Fabio, I'm from Italy and I'm writing to you today because I need your help.
In the past I had the opportunity to use normal maps only inside ZBrush, with the Zmapper plug-in/component without having any kind of problem. Today, I had to begin to work with them again and I'm in a lot of trouble.
I've read several tutorials, posts on this website and I watched several videos on Youtube but I think I'm doing some BIG mistake in the workflow so I need your suggestions.
The problem is that I have to generate a Normal Map of a VERY SIMPLE mesh that you can see below. I made this one in Maya and, in order to get a smoothed version without having to deal with too many polys, I had to generate a Normal Map. In the beginning I thought that this was a very simple mesh so I decided to try using a single UV shell. Basically, I unwrapped the mesh and I got a single Shell. After that, I tried both the transfer map feature of maya, and the xNormal program. The result was the same (as shown below): my map just provided artifacts. The shaded textures is NOT smoothed, it just have a lot of artifacts.
In this image you can see on the left the high poly mesh, on the right the low poly one:
Here you can see a simple render of the low-poly with a normal map applied:
Just to be clear, here is my workflow:
I modeled the mesh, created a copy and smoothed it, deleted the history and freezed transformation, built the cage for xNormal,built the normal map trying the Transfer map approach and the xNormal one. (In xNormal I set the Y negative as suggested in various threads, I used the cage provided by me and the one from the 3D editor).
After this bad result, I had read a lot of stuff here and in other websites and I tried several things. Among them, I tried several others Unwraps of the mesh. This time I splitted the mesh among the parts where I got hard edges (90 degrees). The result was awful as before. I'm posting just one pic of the result and of a normal map for clarity but, again, I tried A LOT of different Umwraps in order to have a good result, but every single map have the same problems of the others.
This is ONE example of ONE unwrap:
An important thing that I can't understand is WHY all these maps don't smooth my mesh. If my low quality mesh was smoothed, but with artifacts, maybe that would have more sense. But the textured mesh is not smoothed at all, it is the low quality mesh + artifacts,, so what I think is that the problem here is not about quality, it is about something completely wrong I'm doing. I'll try to explicit it again: my problem is that I don't even have something to tweak: the results are completely erroneous! After the previous mesh, I tried another one that needs normal maps, again I followed step by step several video tutorials and guides. this was the result:
As you can see, also with this example, the problem is not about quality, or some artifacts around the 90° edges. The problem here is that there is something completely wrong, the geometry is totally insane. No smoothing, no details added, just artifacts. For me, it is impossible to repair it because there is not a single problem, the result is completely wrong.
I tried everything: tweaking the Normals setups in Maya, different export compression...
My idea is that i'm missing something important in the workflow and maybe, with your help, I can solve my problems.
About the renders I posted, these are from Maya. Since I'm working on a project on UDK, I tried the baked maps also there, obviously I get the same awful result.
Thank you very much for your support, I'm very grateful for every advice i can get
Fabio.
P.S. I'd read tons of posts from this forum. In order to help you with your possible suggestions I will write some random settings that I presume are correct so you can check if your suggestion has been already tried by me. Thank you.
1) XNormal: I used -Y for try the maps in UDK, +Y for Maya. Meshes imported were always pre- triangulated in Maya. I tried to use a cage made in Maya Scaling Up the Low Poly mesh and I tried to use the case provided by the 3D Editor. I tried different values in Padding and in resolution.
2)Maya: I exported my mesh with Soften Edges, Harden Edges and I tried to Hard the almost 90° degrees edges and Soften the rest. I read in Earthquake posts that would be better to avoid 90° degrees edges, so I added in my mesh some loops in order to "bevel" those edges. For rendering, I uploaded the Maps in the bump with Tangent configuration, as it should be.Another thing I noticed is that, using the Tranfer Map feature map in Maya I get the same exact artifacts I get with xNormal, this lead me to guess that the problem happens inside maya, before I export the mesh to xNormal.
Changing all these configurations, nothing changes: I always get the SAME mesh, with big awful artifacts. NOTHING improves, the maps changes the meshes, but I get DIFFERENT artifacts, not smaller, not less significant, only different.
Thank you again VERY MUCH for your patience, attention and support.
My name is Fabio, I'm from Italy and I'm writing to you today because I need your help.
In the past I had the opportunity to use normal maps only inside ZBrush, with the Zmapper plug-in/component without having any kind of problem. Today, I had to begin to work with them again and I'm in a lot of trouble.
I've read several tutorials, posts on this website and I watched several videos on Youtube but I think I'm doing some BIG mistake in the workflow so I need your suggestions.
The problem is that I have to generate a Normal Map of a VERY SIMPLE mesh that you can see below. I made this one in Maya and, in order to get a smoothed version without having to deal with too many polys, I had to generate a Normal Map. In the beginning I thought that this was a very simple mesh so I decided to try using a single UV shell. Basically, I unwrapped the mesh and I got a single Shell. After that, I tried both the transfer map feature of maya, and the xNormal program. The result was the same (as shown below): my map just provided artifacts. The shaded textures is NOT smoothed, it just have a lot of artifacts.
In this image you can see on the left the high poly mesh, on the right the low poly one:
Here you can see a simple render of the low-poly with a normal map applied:
Just to be clear, here is my workflow:
I modeled the mesh, created a copy and smoothed it, deleted the history and freezed transformation, built the cage for xNormal,built the normal map trying the Transfer map approach and the xNormal one. (In xNormal I set the Y negative as suggested in various threads, I used the cage provided by me and the one from the 3D editor).
After this bad result, I had read a lot of stuff here and in other websites and I tried several things. Among them, I tried several others Unwraps of the mesh. This time I splitted the mesh among the parts where I got hard edges (90 degrees). The result was awful as before. I'm posting just one pic of the result and of a normal map for clarity but, again, I tried A LOT of different Umwraps in order to have a good result, but every single map have the same problems of the others.
This is ONE example of ONE unwrap:
An important thing that I can't understand is WHY all these maps don't smooth my mesh. If my low quality mesh was smoothed, but with artifacts, maybe that would have more sense. But the textured mesh is not smoothed at all, it is the low quality mesh + artifacts,, so what I think is that the problem here is not about quality, it is about something completely wrong I'm doing. I'll try to explicit it again: my problem is that I don't even have something to tweak: the results are completely erroneous! After the previous mesh, I tried another one that needs normal maps, again I followed step by step several video tutorials and guides. this was the result:
As you can see, also with this example, the problem is not about quality, or some artifacts around the 90° edges. The problem here is that there is something completely wrong, the geometry is totally insane. No smoothing, no details added, just artifacts. For me, it is impossible to repair it because there is not a single problem, the result is completely wrong.
I tried everything: tweaking the Normals setups in Maya, different export compression...
My idea is that i'm missing something important in the workflow and maybe, with your help, I can solve my problems.
About the renders I posted, these are from Maya. Since I'm working on a project on UDK, I tried the baked maps also there, obviously I get the same awful result.
Thank you very much for your support, I'm very grateful for every advice i can get
Fabio.
P.S. I'd read tons of posts from this forum. In order to help you with your possible suggestions I will write some random settings that I presume are correct so you can check if your suggestion has been already tried by me. Thank you.
1) XNormal: I used -Y for try the maps in UDK, +Y for Maya. Meshes imported were always pre- triangulated in Maya. I tried to use a cage made in Maya Scaling Up the Low Poly mesh and I tried to use the case provided by the 3D Editor. I tried different values in Padding and in resolution.
2)Maya: I exported my mesh with Soften Edges, Harden Edges and I tried to Hard the almost 90° degrees edges and Soften the rest. I read in Earthquake posts that would be better to avoid 90° degrees edges, so I added in my mesh some loops in order to "bevel" those edges. For rendering, I uploaded the Maps in the bump with Tangent configuration, as it should be.Another thing I noticed is that, using the Tranfer Map feature map in Maya I get the same exact artifacts I get with xNormal, this lead me to guess that the problem happens inside maya, before I export the mesh to xNormal.
Changing all these configurations, nothing changes: I always get the SAME mesh, with big awful artifacts. NOTHING improves, the maps changes the meshes, but I get DIFFERENT artifacts, not smaller, not less significant, only different.
Thank you again VERY MUCH for your patience, attention and support.
Replies
Currently I'm not at home so I can't provide you a screen from my viewport. But I tried it yesterday and it is very similar to the result of the render. About the configuration, I'm sure that the normal map was uploaded in the bump file and I changed the configuration from "bump" to "world tangent in the material file of the Attribute editor.
Thank you again,
Fabio
i double checked that the map was uploaded correctly with the Tangent Space configuration. As you can see, the right (low-poly) mesh is not smoothed at all and just have the artifacts in the borders. Here the unwrap is not that good, but shouldn't it at least be smooth?
Thank you very much.
Sticky: Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?
As "last image", are you talking about last image of post #1 or the image of post #4?
About the last image of post #1:
In order to try different approaches and try to fix my problem, I tried to increase the polys of my original low mesh in two ways:
1) I manually added some edges in the critical points, as described in the guide you provided and that I read yesterday.
1) I tried to use a Smoothed mesh as my low poly. Basically, the high poly version you can see in the figure was provided by using the "smooth" tool in maya twice, I tried to use it just Once and use the new mesh as low poly. then I duplicated, re-smoothed it and baked my normals.
The result was, in both the situations, as awful as the image above: again not smoothed at all and just more detailed big artifacts.
About the image of post #4:
I tried to add edges in critical points, where I have 90° edges and where I had the curved mesh, again the result was smoothier, but just because of the additional loops I inserted.
About the alignment, the position of the meshes in the image I provided is chosen only for display purposes. The meshes, when exported to xNormal or when using the Transfer Map, are in the same position (origin) with freezed transformations.
Thank you very much for your help.
I only see artifacts on the inside of your mesh now (which is normal, you'll never see the inside/those faces will be culled in game).
Eric, I read it yesterday and that article is the reason i decided to re-model my mesh in order to add some slope in the hard edges.
Earthquake, So the only way I have to smooth a bit my mesh is to add some edges in the critical parts? Because I thought that normal maps could grant some additional smoothiness, and while some parts looks acceptable (in blue), other parts look really too sharp (in red). Is there a way to make my mesh smoothier without adding more edges? (just using some technique in the baking process)
The area in red, I think you're fussing over nothing. When this asset is textured, and in a game with a bunch of other assets, and the player is moving around at game speed you would never notice it.