If only Blender had also a correct way to blend detail normal maps with baked ones, like what UE4 can do. (The top left normal map is simply flat, needed for this to work, did this with someone's guide if I remember right). ...
There's been few node setups for Blender to achieve at least blending two or multiple normal maps together, but none of them have been working exactly right. Not to mention masking...
In cycles? I found a few node setups in the past as well, but wasn't very happy with them either. I just use a vector math average node to combine the normals, it's not 100% accurate but a very simple setup and you can control the blending strength and mask if needed. Will post example later.
@Prime8 Well yeah, Cycles too. But most importantly Eevee, since it's real-time as UE4 is (still both Cycles and Eevee share nodes in 2.8, so both of them should be working with the same node setup). Also for masking detail normal map from unwanted areas, would be cool to know as an additional node setup with the normal map blending as well. Like what Marmoset's "detail weight map" does, for example.
Didn't try Eevee yet, here is a quick example for Cycles. The cube has a normal map with a strong gradient on purpose to make shading issues more obvious, on a regular model they are not so visible. Blending 2 normal maps on top, controlled by the strength value, which has to be doubled (strength 1 results in 0.5 of the original strength). The baked base normal map needs a fix strength of 2 and averaged with all additional normal maps, in this case twice.
Other example, two maps on a flat surface with checker as mask
Is it possible to disable face highlighting when selecting groups of verts/edges? It is really annoying. If I want to select faces I'll go into face sub-object mode.
Here's the error I'm getting now, mate. It only happens with collections. I can't send you the .Blend, sorry. It's work-related. I'm testing now on simple collections of primitives, so if I repro I'll send the .blend.
Also, it deletes all of the objects in the 'high_poly' collection from the scene and seems to randomly duplicate some of the objects in the 'low_poly' collection.
Thanks, I've seen this error as well but had difficulty reproducing it reliably, I'll investigate more tonight. For now, what I think should work is making sure you have on of your objects selected when you press bake.
Thanks @peris yes, I've tested with all collection objects selected. Same error. I'll keep trying. It's definitely a collections related error as baking single objects works perfectly.
I think I have fixed it, I was able to reproduce it consistently on my end at least. Updated with fix: https://github.com/leukbaars/BRM-BakeUI One bug I'm still aware of is that it won't bake if your collections contain non-model objects, which I'll fix after cleaning up the code a bit first
Is it possible to disable face highlighting when selecting groups of verts/edges? It is really annoying. If I want to select faces I'll go into face sub-object mode.
sadly this will probably not happen in quite some time (if ever), as blender is built around the idea that if something is selected its sub components are also selected - like selecting an edge means that its verts are selected too.
@kio thanks, I had a feeling this would be the case. I suppose I'll just have to get used to it. Very annoying though if working in wireframe with ortho refs.
@peris nice. I'll test it now. I'm new to Blender terminology, what are 'non-modal' objects?
Edit: just tested on collections. Works fine. No errors or crashes. Just wondered what method are you using to occlude projection from different low/high pairs? That's why I asked above about 'match by mesh name' or match by bounding box. Or are you just using old-school explode baking?
@peris nice. I'll test it now. I'm new to Blender terminology, what are 'non-modal' objects?
Edit: just tested on collections. Works fine. No errors or crashes. Just wondered what method are you using to occlude projection from different low/high pairs? That's why I asked above about 'match by mesh name' or match by bounding box. Or are you just using old-school explode baking?
I mean objects in your collection that are not a model, like a light or an empty. Blender will throw an error when you try to bake with those selected. Should be very easy to handle that in my tool though.
I'm not doing any exploding or hi/low pairing. It's something I may add in the future, if I decide the extra complexity is worth it. For now, I'm leaning towards keeping the tool simple!
@peris sounds great. These days assets are made from multiple pieces so not having an auto-explode based on naming/bounding box/MatID severely limits your baking tool. Just my opinion. Otherwise, I think it's perfect.
Happy to see that they are planning to implement mitering, one of the things I liked when working with C4D. The "harden normals" feature is awesome too.
Reminded me of something I wanted to share, probably most of you know already anyway. When working with subd I usually use a bevel modifier with 2 segments and profile set to 1 to create edgeloops and be able to change the size. If the surface is not completely flat, that can cause quite a bit of pinching, therefore I use a profile of 0.99 instead. Somehow the difference between 0.99 and 1 is quite big, not sure if that's a bug, the width has to be lowered to get a similar sharpness. Excited to see which results we can get with different miters in the future.
@Prime8 Bevel in blender 2.8 have a harden normal and other new options. Abou this pinching happening there, sometimes in profile 1 for some reason the middle edge get a little bumped, thats may be causing the problem there.
Also, can you show the topology? the surface looks awfully good on the bottom for subdiv+bevel modifier xd.
When using profile 1 on curved surfaces, I think the pinching comes from the edge being "too flat" and not following the curvature. The topo was very simple, didn't actually save that thing, here another one.
We have updated AssetGen (a completely free addon) now you select your high poly(s) and it exports a game asset to your game engine in glb or glTF, you just have to work on your high poly, the entire workflow to make it game ready is automated. You can edit your high poly and instantly see your game asset getting updated in your game.
Am I missing something here? Not behaving correctly at all.
And how the topology should look(this is from Max)
@musashidan It's not the holy grail, but works in many situation and the shading is fine as you can see, even though the topology is not the ideal. We hopefully come closer to that once mitering is in 2.8, I was still referring to 2.7. The bevel weight has some limitations to, but can be used as well. If I need ideal topology I still have to do that manually in Blender and will not be able to change the sharpness by any parameter.
@Prime8 Yeah mate, Chamfer(Bevel) modifier + Sub-D is an essential part of my hard-surface workflow in Max. I've been testing modeling in Blender 2.80 these last few weeks to see how it stacks up against Max. Max's Chamfer(Bevel) modifier and InsetSG modifier are by far the best I've seen so far for this kind of work. I'm just wondering did you manually reroute some topo on your examples? Without the mitering the topology in Blender's Bevel mod is pretty bad so I'm assuming you did.
@Prime8 Yeah mate, Chamfer(Bevel) modifier + Sub-D is an essential part of my hard-surface workflow in Max. I've been testing modeling in Blender 2.80 these last few weeks to see how it stacks up against Max. Max's Chamfer(Bevel) modifier and InsetSG modifier are by far the best I've seen so far for this kind of work. I'm just wondering did you manually reroute some topo on your examples? Without the mitering the topology in Blender's Bevel mod is pretty bad so I'm assuming you did.
@musashidan You can see the topology on my screenshot and the modifier stack is the same as above, didn't reroute or add anything. The bevel topology doesn't look good, but seems to work with subd, you can try it. Anyway we don't have to wait long for the nice additions to the bevel modifier.
@Udjani Just grabbed today's build. Mitreing is still behaving strangely on curved surfaces.
EDIT: just doing some more testing and it seems that the cylinder result below is actually correct. My example above from Max is using the InsetSG modifier and not the Chamfer(Bevel) modifier. Max does have another algorithm, but I can't show it as it's from beta.
@musashidan Oh yes, if you have an edge or more conneceted the algorithm don't know what to do with it, they were discussing it if that edge should connect with the two edges on the sides or the middle like the max example. Will probably be solved in the next few days.
@Linko I admire your work and persistence, AssetGen is incredibly helpful for small teams. I have a small question, would it be possible to generate the diffuse texture based on a Workbench render instead of EEVEE/Cycles? Sometimes I get a nice look and feel with Workbench which I would love to transfer to a low-poly. Thanks a lot and have a nice day
Works like a charm with both blending two normal maps and flipping the Y-channel with "RGB Curves", thank you a lot. My normal maps were already having X+, Y- and Z+, so I inverted the curves to get Y+. I tested this on my previous character porject's hoodie. It has albedo (base color), metalness, roughness and two normal maps, baked one and tiling fabric.
I also have curvature and ambient occlusion maps for this character, but it's out of the scope of Cycles, so no need for those though.
...but masking with a typical black & white mask texture I couldn't figure out a way to find a working node setup for it though, so those fabric details are tiled all over the place which isn't ideal, obviously.
Then with a little bit of googling, I found a quite recent thread with discussion about masking normal maps in Blender. There's also some discussion about even more complex mathematically correct blendings at the end of the thread: https://blenderartists.org/t/masking-normal-maps/1130591/2
cgCody member of that forum kinda provided a solution, but didn't include a proper screenshot of his node setup, so I'm a bit lost. So, my mask texture in the node editor is selected but being a little bit lonely there, haha.
From time to time I've tried to use Cycle's nodes for materializing real-time game assets in Cycles (and in EEVEE in future), but I've ended up using either Marmoset or UE4 for the sake of simplicity and standardization of using materials and textures. But it's interesting to replicate thise kind of thing in Blender too.
@Udjani Just grabbed today's build. Mitreing is still behaving strangely on curved surfaces.
EDIT: just doing some more testing and it seems that the cylinder result below is actually correct. My example above from Max is using the InsetSG modifier and not the Chamfer(Bevel) modifier. Max does have another algorithm, but I can't show it as it's from beta.
Cylinder;
Still getting some weird topology errors
@musashidan I tested 2.8 as well and found that the bevel behaves different from 2.7. A profile setting of 0.7 is roughly the same as 0.99 before. Once 2.8 bevel is final, I will test it more in depth to see if that workflow is still valid or not, or even obsolete, due to new features.
Works like a charm with both blending two normal maps and flipping the Y-channel with "RGB Curves", thank you a lot. My normal maps were already having X+, Y- and Z+, so I inverted the curves to get Y+. I tested this on my previous character porject's hoodie. It has albedo (base color), metalness, roughness and two normal maps, baked one and tiling fabric.
I also have curvature and ambient occlusion maps for this character, but it's out of the scope of Cycles, so no need for those though.
...but masking with a typical black & white mask texture I couldn't figure out a way to find a working node setup for it though, so those fabric details are tiled all over the place which isn't ideal, obviously.
Then with a little bit of googling, I found a quite recent thread with discussion about masking normal maps in Blender. There's also some discussion about even more complex mathematically correct blendings at the end of the thread: https://blenderartists.org/t/masking-normal-maps/1130591/2
cgCody member of that forum kinda provided a solution, but didn't include a proper screenshot of his node setup, so I'm a bit lost. So, my mask texture in the node editor is selected but being a little bit lonely there, haha.
From time to time I've tried to use Cycle's nodes for materializing real-time game assets in Cycles (and in EEVEE in future), but I've ended up using either Marmoset or UE4 for the sake of simplicity and standardization of using materials and textures. But it's interesting to replicate thise kind of thing in Blender too.
I have seen and tried quite a few complex setups in the past, though I have to admit that often I didn't understand exactly what they did. Using the vector math node for normal vectors seemed quite fitting, so I stuck with it. Didn't your masking work correctly when plugging it into the strength input of your blended normal map? I would set the mask image to non-color and at a math multiplier to control the total strength. It is shown in one of my screenshots. Texture painting the mask in render view should work too.
Hey guys! Any rules on UV unwrapping objects with face weighted normals? Should I cut bevel faces entirely? Or I can cut how I want and avoid stretching?
Any opinions of this uv map? I've been learning 'uv strengthening' which people insist is amazing or something.
honestly I feel it swould be better with seams, to me, this rectable, while using the space more efficiently, it looks like a freak of nature.
Short answer, use your best judgement. Longer answer, It really depends on how you're planning on texturing it and the specific model. For this model I would suggest against this UV unwrap because there is going to be extreme stretching. That's not to say you shouldn't straighten your UV's. Straightening your UV's will help remove any unwanted seams and it make texturing a breeze. I would first suggest you add a UV checker grid to your object so that you can preview how your textures will be mapped and spot any stretching issues quick. From there it's down to you. I could tell you how I personally would unwrap this but I think you'll learn much more by chucking a uv checker texture on your object and experimenting and seeing what you can come up with. There's no perfect unwrap but there's certainly bad ways to unwrap.
Replies
I just use a vector math average node to combine the normals, it's not 100% accurate but a very simple setup and you can control the blending strength and mask if needed. Will post example later.
The cube has a normal map with a strong gradient on purpose to make shading issues more obvious, on a regular model they are not so visible.
Blending 2 normal maps on top, controlled by the strength value, which has to be doubled (strength 1 results in 0.5 of the original strength). The baked base normal map needs a fix strength of 2 and averaged with all additional normal maps, in this case twice.
Other example, two maps on a flat surface with checker as mask
Also, it deletes all of the objects in the 'high_poly' collection from the scene and seems to randomly duplicate some of the objects in the 'low_poly' collection.
One bug I'm still aware of is that it won't bake if your collections contain non-model objects, which I'll fix after cleaning up the code a bit first
Edit: just tested on collections. Works fine. No errors or crashes. Just wondered what method are you using to occlude projection from different low/high pairs? That's why I asked above about 'match by mesh name' or match by bounding box. Or are you just using old-school explode baking?
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/gsoc-2018-bevel-improvements/440/130
I'm not doing any exploding or hi/low pairing. It's something I may add in the future, if I decide the extra complexity is worth it. For now, I'm leaning towards keeping the tool simple!
The "harden normals" feature is awesome too.
Reminded me of something I wanted to share, probably most of you know already anyway.
When working with subd I usually use a bevel modifier with 2 segments and profile set to 1 to create edgeloops and be able to change the size. If the surface is not completely flat, that can cause quite a bit of pinching, therefore I use a profile of 0.99 instead. Somehow the difference between 0.99 and 1 is quite big, not sure if that's a bug, the width has to be lowered to get a similar sharpness.
Excited to see which results we can get with different miters in the future.
Also, can you show the topology? the surface looks awfully good on the bottom for subdiv+bevel modifier xd.
The topo was very simple, didn't actually save that thing, here another one.
It's not the holy grail, but works in many situation and the shading is fine as you can see, even though the topology is not the ideal. We hopefully come closer to that once mitering is in 2.8, I was still referring to 2.7. The bevel weight has some limitations to, but can be used as well.
If I need ideal topology I still have to do that manually in Blender and will not be able to change the sharpness by any parameter.
Anyway we don't have to wait long for the nice additions to the bevel modifier.
Good, let me know if it works for you or if you find any way to improve it.
If you want to take a look at the discussion: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/gsoc-2018-bevel-improvements/440/173
@musashidan
I tested 2.8 as well and found that the bevel behaves different from 2.7. A profile setting of 0.7 is roughly the same as 0.99 before.
Once 2.8 bevel is final, I will test it more in depth to see if that workflow is still valid or not, or even obsolete, due to new features.
@FourtyNights
I have seen and tried quite a few complex setups in the past, though I have to admit that often I didn't understand exactly what they did.
Using the vector math node for normal vectors seemed quite fitting, so I stuck with it.
Didn't your masking work correctly when plugging it into the strength input of your blended normal map?
I would set the mask image to non-color and at a math multiplier to control the total strength. It is shown in one of my screenshots.
Texture painting the mask in render view should work too.
Hello
Next Gen a Netflix Original. Previz and Lighting Reel / Blender