Just something thats been bugging me for a while, the viewport controls get really jittery for me and times and the model will skip around. Sometimes jumping entirely offscreen. And it seems as if it centers the model every time you try to rotate around it, which can be a little annoying if you're trying to get a specific view.... And is there anyway to pan the viewport?
The jittery thing may have something to do with setting the priority down to "below normal" in windows cause i usually have to do that while rendering larger maps.
[ QUOTE ]
is there any ways to add more lights to the preview scene?
[/ QUOTE ]
Nope, only one dynamic light is supported.
You can also control the ambient of the light and/or to add a diffuse cubemap for simulating outdoor ambient lighting.
I don't allow to use more than one light because I don't wanna do other lighting pass(too slow) and can't add one instruction more to the shaders because I will pass the 127 slots in SM2.0. With SM3.0/DX10 will be easier, but not much HW atm are supporting it
[ QUOTE ]
it seems as if it centers the model every time you try to rotate around it
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, each time you press the CTRL key will "look at" mass center. To pan the camera use ASDW keys. To change the look point use right mouse button+move mouse. To control how much the camera advances use the "camera sensibility" yellow slider.
The jitter thing I think is because I forgot to stop reading input events when you change the active window or the FPS drops too much... Need to revise it.
Btw, the v3.9.4 will be on the way with some bug corrections in a few.
Atm I'm too much occupied atm to include new features I should kick all and redesign completely the 4.0... but no time
hm..i might be stupid or something, but is there any way to increase the cage ray distance ? like the option on 3ds max i get some raymiss in xnormal, but in 3ds max if i increase the cage it fixes it , but 3ds max crashes with the most detailed object
[ QUOTE ]
is there any way to increase the cage ray distance ?
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, check the "use cages" option in the lowpoly options.
( by default xNormal uses uniform ray distances.. to use cages check the "use cage" so the uniform ray distances will be ignored )
After that, enter the 3D viewer, mark the "edit cages", then edit the front/back cage. If you don't select any vertex all the cage will be extruded/contrapted, you can also select some vertices and move them with the selection slider.
See how the wall and acid cages are setup and the PDF, the section about "how to measure a good ray distance" for more details.
hope it helps.
Awesome program! I especially love the lightning fast (using duel core, XP64), no-fuss ambient occlusion bake.
At the moment I can't get the normal maps to work exactly right. Everything looks good except the seams. Everything is in one smoothing group, with "smoothing" turned on in xNormal, and tested with Obj, 3DS and ASE... same seam issues. It is especially weird since, for example, one arms shoulder seam is perfect while the other arm's seam is mismatched-- I haven't tried manually tweaking the cage yet.
It hardly matters though since the program is still super useful to me. Thanks!
I've got a mesh from mudbox(~1 million faces) thats crashing on "removing illegal geometry" Any idea why? I've opened it up in another program and exported again(obj) and still the same crash.
[ QUOTE ]
I've got a mesh from mudbox(~1 million faces) thats crashing on "removing illegal geometry" Any idea why? I've opened it up in another program and exported again(obj) and still the same crash.
[/ QUOTE ]
What that thing does is to remove degenerated triangles and re-hash the vertices to sure there are not duplicates (only if mesh has less than 32k faces/vertices).
I can't see any error in the code atm... Does the OBJ import well in other programs like Milkshape3D, 3dsmax or maya? Can youy import well a lowpoly mesh exported by Mudbox?
You can send me the obj to granthill76 at yahoo dot com to do some test if ya need ( make it a ZIP/RAR, objs can be compressed very well usually )
Strangely enough it seems to error out on the base mesh i used to paint in mudbox as well, unless i save it out as .lwo from modo isntead of .obj(from anything, modo, maya or mudbox) so.... some strange obj error?! i dunno. I sent you an email with a link to the file.
Well, if I try to view it with the DX9 graphics driver it tells me the GeForce6800 that I have can't load meshes with more than 1M triangles... but changing to OpenGL it can view it, but loads the OBJ without errors.
I will investigate a few more to see if I can detect any error though.
ps: omg the camera orbiting SUX badly when the object is not at origin! I really need to correct that.
Yeah that really does suck, i get that quite a lot when im doing buildings and rendering out individual pieces that arent centered. Even if something is just slightly offcenter it gets pretty annoying, maybe you could auto center to the object instead of the world origin?
for some reason even after editing the cage itr gives me this weird bug along with some ray miss stuff in xnormal , it renders fine in 3ds max , what happened ?
ok let's take a break from all those questions/bug reports (which are veeerrryyy important too, don't get me wrong !) to thank you again. Man, your tool is just saving my life everyday. The last exemple was today, when 3dsmax told me "haha, are you kidding...? ok, be serious, let's crash!" when I tried to load a multiple obj model around 11.000.000 triangles. Our good friend Xnormal just did it like a charme and in addition of that, the viewer gave me the opportunity to watch this very highpoly model in real-time (which is really pleasant) God I'm IN LOVE !
[ QUOTE ]
for some reason even after editing the cage itr gives me this weird bug along with some ray miss stuff in xnormal , it renders fine in 3ds max , what happened ?
[/ QUOTE ]
Have you set the inner cage or only the outter one? You need to setup both.
Do you saved your file with cage as OVB or SBM? If not the cage info can't be stored.
Can you send me your file by email to granthill76 'at' yahoo dot com to do some test with it pls? RAR it, it usually compress well.
btw, the 3.9.4 is in progress and will be up by December 22 aprox. Updated some details in my blog.
Since I exported my very highpoly model in the viewer and realised that it was just working fine, I got a bit frustrated by the fact I wasn't able to control maps such as specular/diffuse on this highpoly model. I know that this tool has been designed for a game-art orientation, but it looks like it could be use as a "real-time" highpoly viewer too.
I of course maybe missed something about the setup of that kind of model
Same memory errors, for no apparent reason. Whats most frustrating about this is that its erroring when its trying to dilate, after the map is actually rendered. Surely no reason to being using gigs and gigs of memory if you're only doing a post thing to expand the pixels on the image, right?
Same memory errors, for no apparent reason. Whats most frustrating about this is that its erroring when its trying to dilate, after the map is actually rendered. Surely no reason to being using gigs and gigs of memory if you're only doing a post thing to expand the pixels on the image, right?
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, only expanding pixels... For that map you will need:
4096x2048x 32 bytes per pixel ( XYZ+RGBA+occ+height in float precission ) x 2 ( to allow to do a copy for dilation levels ) = 536Mb
If I remember well I think the 3.9.0 was a bit conflictive with that dilation filter. Does that happen that with the latest one?
I can check the latest i didnt realize there was a new one out, what i dont understand is why i'm getting a memory error when i'm only using half of my system ram(2 gigs) and 1/5th of my PF(5 gigs). I realize it takes quite a bit of memory to do that size of map, but i'm nowhere close to being out of memory as the program suggests.
I've got memory errors too like that. I was rendering normal and albedo maps 2048x2048. When I had the front face distance at 0.1 and backface at 0.2(ish), I'd get the memory error. Changing the backface distance to 0.5 stopped the problem.
I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of normal mapping so maybe I was just being an idiot. I've got 2 gigs of ram btw. The normal maps are still coming out ok with 0.5 backface, just thought I'd let you know incase that is an actual problem.
- Localization. Now can use various languages.
- Fixed mirrored UV problems. Added an example using mirrored UVs (horizontally and vertically ), cylindrical mapping, spherical mapping and continous mapping.
- Improved shadows and highpoly rendering speed under SM3.0 and DX9
- Improved camera orbiting and object centering
- Added ZIPPED package option. Sepparated the tutorials and SDK from the main package.
- Fixed some minor bugs
Although I marked it as beta I think is ok... just did that because the translation XML files were generated with altavista's babelfish so... if you find any translation error please correct it in the xNormalDir\ui\localization_XXXXX.xml file and send it me back if you want! To add other language just copy the localization_.xml and rename it, for example, to localization_arabic.xml and then translate the english phrases to the language. You can select the default language in the plugin manager.
To see right-to-left languages like arabic or hebrew and to see asian characters remember to install the Windows extra fonts.
nice jogshy ! ths will be a weird request , bt maybe could you make the cage projection to be chosen in the normal map part ? withou having to launch the realtime iewer ? that woul be perfect , more or less make it like 3ds max ,it might be hard thou
P.S - i will translate it to portuguese if you want
"This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor."
I checked online to make sure that this cpu is 64 bit, and all sources say it is, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm running windows xp (32 bit), do you think that could be the problem?
[ QUOTE ]
I'm trying to install the 64 version on my new comp with a core duo, but I get an error message saying
"An error occurred attempting to install xNormal v3.9.4 Beta 1 (64-bits x64)."
Details say:
"This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor."
I checked online to make sure that this cpu is 64 bit, and all sources say it is, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm running windows xp (32 bit), do you think that could be the problem?
[/ QUOTE ]
The x64 version only can be installed under Windows XP 64 Professional or Vista x64. For windows 2000, XP or Vista x86 you need the x86 version ( even having an AMD64/EMT64 )... so for your Intel Core 2 ( which is a 64 bits EMT64 processor ), if you run it with WindowsXP 32bits, you need the x86 installer one.
Btw, if you have already installed the .NET 2.0, windows installer 3.1, DirectX 9.0c April 2006 Edition (or above) and the VC++ 2005 Runtime DLLs or you already installed any xNormal 3.9.3 or above, I recommend you to download better the ZIPPED version, which is only 20Mb-ish and can be installed with a file copy/paste.
[ QUOTE ]
P.S - i will translate it to portuguese if you want
[/ QUOTE ]
Sure thx! Just correct the bad phrases in the [xNormalInstallationDirectory]\ui\localization_portuguese.xml and send it me back when ya can! ( edit only the sentences between "" ), for example, edit the:
<GenerateMapsTooltip Value="Click here to START generating the maps"/>
Just tested the new version, working great. Nice to see 4 cores on 100% usage
About the inner cage, i never got really how it works, or better, i never got how it improves the final look. Perhaps because i start doing these on rendertotexture.
I've been trying to use the cages since I'm getting a bunch of problem areas. But for some reason, when I extrude a cage point along it's normal, it splits into two and they move in different directions, leaving a gap in the cage. I've checked the meshes in other programs to make sure the verts were welded together, even whether seams were marked for LSCM unwrapping, but it seemed fine.
Also, even with the front cage a fair bit off the mesh, it seems the normal map will still sometimes back detail from a lower layer in the high poly model. Changing the backface didn't seem to help.
[ QUOTE ]
I've been trying to use the cages since I'm getting a bunch of problem areas. But for some reason, when I extrude a cage point along it's normal, it splits into two and they move in different directions, leaving a gap in the cage. I've checked the meshes in other programs to make sure the verts were welded together, even whether seams were marked for LSCM unwrapping, but it seemed fine.
[/ QUOTE ]
Thats because the vertex uses more than one normal to do hard edges and planar surfaces. That behavior is required to conserve the hard edges(smoothing groups) in the normal map for certain circunstances. The vertices on cage are extruded along their normals.
To avoid that just sure the vertex exports/uses only one normal ( like the averaged one ).
[ QUOTE ]
I'm running xNormal with a 4.1M tri hipolymodel and get an out of memory error.
I've got 4gigs + 8 gigs virtual
Target map 2048x2048 with default settings, no AA.
Running the memory conservative generator
task manager shows xnormal allocating less than a gig of mem at max before it gives me the error msg.
That really shouldn't be happening, should it?
[/ QUOTE ]
Nope, that shouldn't happen, indeed.
How much **free** memory do you have? Do you see the left RAM indicator low? You can see the exact RAM used in the raytracing opening the xN_debugLog.txt file.
Are you using the latest version? Are you using winxp 64bits? If ya want please send me the high+low models compressed(7zip or kgb can compress it well) to granthill76 at yahoo dot com and I promise to do some test for you.
thx
The final 3.9.4 has been uploaded.
Feel free to download and test a few.
ps: I know the translations are still not good but well... if you see someone bad just edit the XML file and send it to me if ya want.
what have you done to the shadows the previous ones were so nice
(got a geforce 6600)
the new fast antialiasing rendering thingies are pimp tho
I'm gathering samples and writing you a little request email, if possible, for additional things to render
[ QUOTE ]
what have you done to the shadows the previous ones were so nice
(got a geforce 6600)
[/ QUOTE ]
The DX9 SM3.0 driver now uses true penumbra soft shadows with noise jittering ( are slow, I know! but wanted to investigate a few ). If this is too slow you can disable the penumbra noise(=use PCF) in the plugin manager. Also you can change to the OpenGL driver which uses much faster ones. I prefer the OpenGL one, is faster hehe!
I think I will include for the next version a thing to allow you to set the kind of shadows you want.
thx for the PM., was very instructive, gonna try to include those things
btw, I have the 3.10.0 almost finished with interesting new features!
Just a suggestion (don't know if others would disagree), but for the 3d viewer, how about doing away with using the alpha channel for transparency/spec-lvl/gloss/etc. and giving them their own slots?
For baking, if you only want to bake ambient occlusion or a height map and not a normal map, it would be nice to bake these out independent of the normal map/ turn normal map baking on/off.
Same goes for the cavity/thickness/convexity maps as far as baking into separate maps instead of one goes.
Yeah i'de like to see an option to only do ambocc and no normal, so many times i change my ambocc settings to be have things like lower quality AA and such, after rendering a good normal map and i have to rename the map to render the amb and not screw it up.
This might be impossible , and i might be saying a shitload of nonsense, but do you think you could add a functionality where we load the lowpoly model with the normal maps applied , and you render an AO from eaach texture with the normal map detail ? and maybe you could with it simulate cavity mapping ? its pretty much what you do in max , render an AO from the normal detail , but would be interesting to see what you can pull !
Just a suggestion (don't know if others would disagree), but for the 3d viewer, how about doing away with using the alpha channel for transparency/spec-lvl/gloss/etc. and giving them their own slots?
[/ QUOTE ]
Unfortunally I am completely out of PS3.0 texture sampler and input registers ( 10 of 10 being used now... ) That's why need to pack some channels in the alpha
[ QUOTE ]
eah i'de like to see an option to only do ambocc and no normal, so many times i change my ambocc settings to be have things like lower quality AA and such, after rendering a good normal map and i have to rename the map to render the amb and not screw it up.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ok! Gonna change that.
[ QUOTE ]
Same goes for the cavity/thickness/convexity maps as far as baking into separate maps instead of one goes.
[/ QUOTE ]
Convexity and thickness are almost instant, what slows is the proximity. I'm gonna sepparate the proximity from all the others in the final version.
[ QUOTE ]
This might be impossible , and i might be saying a shitload of nonsense, but do you think you could add a functionality where we load the lowpoly model with the normal maps applied , and you render an AO from eaach texture with the normal map detail ? and maybe you could with it simulate cavity mapping ? its pretty much what you do in max , render an AO from the normal detail , but would be interesting to see what you can pull !
Hey guys, I'm starting to play around with xnormal so I can learn it before the War starts and I got some ???s Its really more of a general question I guess but here goes... Where do you plug in an occlusion map? Do you just layer it over the diffuse map in photoshop or what? I'm a maya user by the way.
Thanks for the awesome app Jogshy
For most game graphics, you composite an AO map on top of existing diffuse in your image software, to add a bit of detail, on top of Spec maps to help define edges and surfaces and the like, or use it as a mask for dirt and grime. I don't know of any engine that uses AO maps as a separate map. Oh, and these are just examples, and not the only things this can be used as, just that most of the time it's best used when making the other maps.
[ QUOTE ]
The normalmap has been packed in memory and now occupies two-times less memory ( which allows you to generate larger maps without running out of memory ).
This is an excellent application, and I've had so much use for it.
I do have a little problem, and I don't know if it's been brought up before (I did a quick browse through the thread and searched to the best of my ability).
The problem is the mesh is invisible in the 3D viewer when using the default Direct3D9 Graphics Driver, however when using the OpenGL 1.3 driver everything is fine and dandy. It's been like this for as far as I can remember, but seeing how it's set as default, I don't think it is working as intended.
My graphics card is an ATI X1900 XTX with the latest drivers (7.1 - but I've had this problem the past 2 or 3 driver revisions), and I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2, with everything updated to latest versions. It's always the low poly mesh that is invisible while the high poly is visible, and it doesn't matter if it has textures applied, or not.
Has anyone else run into this problem? I'm kinda scratching my head here..
The problem is the mesh is invisible in the 3D viewer when using the default Direct3D9 Graphics Driver, however when using the OpenGL 1.3 driver everything is fine and dandy.
[/ QUOTE ]
I found a nice bug in the 3.10.0 painting high poly meshes. Perhaps is that.
I just uploaded the 3.10.1 with some bugs corrections btw. Please try with this new version better.
If still doesn't work feel free to send me the problematic model to my contact mail if ya want, I promise to take a look ( and meanwhile keep using the OGL driver if goes well )
Replies
The jittery thing may have something to do with setting the priority down to "below normal" in windows cause i usually have to do that while rendering larger maps.
is there any ways to add more lights to the preview scene?
[/ QUOTE ]
Nope, only one dynamic light is supported.
You can also control the ambient of the light and/or to add a diffuse cubemap for simulating outdoor ambient lighting.
I don't allow to use more than one light because I don't wanna do other lighting pass(too slow) and can't add one instruction more to the shaders because I will pass the 127 slots in SM2.0. With SM3.0/DX10 will be easier, but not much HW atm are supporting it
[ QUOTE ]
it seems as if it centers the model every time you try to rotate around it
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, each time you press the CTRL key will "look at" mass center. To pan the camera use ASDW keys. To change the look point use right mouse button+move mouse. To control how much the camera advances use the "camera sensibility" yellow slider.
The jitter thing I think is because I forgot to stop reading input events when you change the active window or the FPS drops too much... Need to revise it.
Btw, the v3.9.4 will be on the way with some bug corrections in a few.
Atm I'm too much occupied atm to include new features
is there any way to increase the cage ray distance ?
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, check the "use cages" option in the lowpoly options.
( by default xNormal uses uniform ray distances.. to use cages check the "use cage" so the uniform ray distances will be ignored )
After that, enter the 3D viewer, mark the "edit cages", then edit the front/back cage. If you don't select any vertex all the cage will be extruded/contrapted, you can also select some vertices and move them with the selection slider.
See how the wall and acid cages are setup and the PDF, the section about "how to measure a good ray distance" for more details.
hope it helps.
At the moment I can't get the normal maps to work exactly right. Everything looks good except the seams. Everything is in one smoothing group, with "smoothing" turned on in xNormal, and tested with Obj, 3DS and ASE... same seam issues. It is especially weird since, for example, one arms shoulder seam is perfect while the other arm's seam is mismatched-- I haven't tried manually tweaking the cage yet.
It hardly matters though since the program is still super useful to me. Thanks!
I've got a mesh from mudbox(~1 million faces) thats crashing on "removing illegal geometry" Any idea why? I've opened it up in another program and exported again(obj) and still the same crash.
[/ QUOTE ]
What that thing does is to remove degenerated triangles and re-hash the vertices to sure there are not duplicates (only if mesh has less than 32k faces/vertices).
I can't see any error in the code atm... Does the OBJ import well in other programs like Milkshape3D, 3dsmax or maya? Can youy import well a lowpoly mesh exported by Mudbox?
You can send me the obj to granthill76 at yahoo dot com to do some test if ya need ( make it a ZIP/RAR, objs can be compressed very well usually )
Well, if I try to view it with the DX9 graphics driver it tells me the GeForce6800 that I have can't load meshes with more than 1M triangles... but changing to OpenGL it can view it, but loads the OBJ without errors.
I will investigate a few more to see if I can detect any error though.
ps: omg the camera orbiting SUX badly when the object is not at origin! I really need to correct that.
keep up the good work !!
for some reason even after editing the cage itr gives me this weird bug along with some ray miss stuff in xnormal , it renders fine in 3ds max , what happened
[/ QUOTE ]
Have you set the inner cage or only the outter one? You need to setup both.
Do you saved your file with cage as OVB or SBM? If not the cage info can't be stored.
Can you send me your file by email to granthill76 'at' yahoo dot com to do some test with it pls? RAR it, it usually compress well.
btw, the 3.9.4 is in progress and will be up by December 22 aprox. Updated some details in my blog.
I of course maybe missed something about the setup of that kind of model
Same memory errors, for no apparent reason. Whats most frustrating about this is that its erroring when its trying to dilate, after the map is actually rendered. Surely no reason to being using gigs and gigs of memory if you're only doing a post thing to expand the pixels on the image, right?
Same memory errors, for no apparent reason. Whats most frustrating about this is that its erroring when its trying to dilate, after the map is actually rendered. Surely no reason to being using gigs and gigs of memory if you're only doing a post thing to expand the pixels on the image, right?
[/ QUOTE ]
Yep, only expanding pixels... For that map you will need:
4096x2048x 32 bytes per pixel ( XYZ+RGBA+occ+height in float precission ) x 2 ( to allow to do a copy for dilation levels ) = 536Mb
If I remember well I think the 3.9.0 was a bit conflictive with that dilation filter. Does that happen that with the latest one?
I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of normal mapping so maybe I was just being an idiot. I've got 2 gigs of ram btw. The normal maps are still coming out ok with 0.5 backface, just thought I'd let you know incase that is an actual problem.
- Localization. Now can use various languages.
- Fixed mirrored UV problems. Added an example using mirrored UVs (horizontally and vertically ), cylindrical mapping, spherical mapping and continous mapping.
- Improved shadows and highpoly rendering speed under SM3.0 and DX9
- Improved camera orbiting and object centering
- Added ZIPPED package option. Sepparated the tutorials and SDK from the main package.
- Fixed some minor bugs
Although I marked it as beta I think is ok... just did that because the translation XML files were generated with altavista's babelfish so... if you find any translation error please correct it in the xNormalDir\ui\localization_XXXXX.xml file and send it me back if you want! To add other language just copy the localization_.xml and rename it, for example, to localization_arabic.xml and then translate the english phrases to the language. You can select the default language in the plugin manager.
To see right-to-left languages like arabic or hebrew and to see asian characters remember to install the Windows extra fonts.
P.S - i will translate it to portuguese if you want
"An error occurred attempting to install xNormal v3.9.4 Beta 1 (64-bits x64)."
Details say:
"This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor."
I checked online to make sure that this cpu is 64 bit, and all sources say it is, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm running windows xp (32 bit), do you think that could be the problem?
I'm trying to install the 64 version on my new comp with a core duo, but I get an error message saying
"An error occurred attempting to install xNormal v3.9.4 Beta 1 (64-bits x64)."
Details say:
"This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor."
I checked online to make sure that this cpu is 64 bit, and all sources say it is, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm running windows xp (32 bit), do you think that could be the problem?
[/ QUOTE ]
The x64 version only can be installed under Windows XP 64 Professional or Vista x64. For windows 2000, XP or Vista x86 you need the x86 version ( even having an AMD64/EMT64 )... so for your Intel Core 2 ( which is a 64 bits EMT64 processor ), if you run it with WindowsXP 32bits, you need the x86 installer one.
Btw, if you have already installed the .NET 2.0, windows installer 3.1, DirectX 9.0c April 2006 Edition (or above) and the VC++ 2005 Runtime DLLs or you already installed any xNormal 3.9.3 or above, I recommend you to download better the ZIPPED version, which is only 20Mb-ish and can be installed with a file copy/paste.
[ QUOTE ]
P.S - i will translate it to portuguese if you want
[/ QUOTE ]
Sure thx! Just correct the bad phrases in the [xNormalInstallationDirectory]\ui\localization_portuguese.xml and send it me back when ya can! ( edit only the sentences between "" ), for example, edit the:
<GenerateMapsTooltip Value="Click here to START generating the maps"/>
by
<GenerateMapsTooltip Value="Clique aqui para COME
About the inner cage, i never got really how it works, or better, i never got how it improves the final look. Perhaps because i start doing these on rendertotexture.
Also, even with the front cage a fair bit off the mesh, it seems the normal map will still sometimes back detail from a lower layer in the high poly model. Changing the backface didn't seem to help.
I've been trying to use the cages since I'm getting a bunch of problem areas. But for some reason, when I extrude a cage point along it's normal, it splits into two and they move in different directions, leaving a gap in the cage. I've checked the meshes in other programs to make sure the verts were welded together, even whether seams were marked for LSCM unwrapping, but it seemed fine.
[/ QUOTE ]
Thats because the vertex uses more than one normal to do hard edges and planar surfaces. That behavior is required to conserve the hard edges(smoothing groups) in the normal map for certain circunstances. The vertices on cage are extruded along their normals.
To avoid that just sure the vertex exports/uses only one normal ( like the averaged one ).
Hope it helps.
I'm running xNormal with a 4.1M tri hipolymodel and get an out of memory error.
I've got 4gigs + 8 gigs virtual
Target map 2048x2048 with default settings, no AA.
Running the memory conservative generator
task manager shows xnormal allocating less than a gig of mem at max before it gives me the error msg.
That really shouldn't be happening, should it?
[/ QUOTE ]
Nope, that shouldn't happen, indeed.
How much **free** memory do you have? Do you see the left RAM indicator low? You can see the exact RAM used in the raytracing opening the xN_debugLog.txt file.
Are you using the latest version? Are you using winxp 64bits? If ya want please send me the high+low models compressed(7zip or kgb can compress it well) to granthill76 at yahoo dot com and I promise to do some test for you.
thx
Feel free to download and test a few.
ps: I know the translations are still not good but well... if you see someone bad just edit the XML file and send it to me if ya want.
www.xnormal.net
Enjoy!
(got a geforce 6600)
the new fast antialiasing rendering thingies are pimp tho
I'm gathering samples and writing you a little request email, if possible, for additional things to render
edit : pm sent
what have you done to the shadows
(got a geforce 6600)
[/ QUOTE ]
The DX9 SM3.0 driver now uses true penumbra soft shadows with noise jittering ( are slow, I know! but wanted to investigate a few ). If this is too slow you can disable the penumbra noise(=use PCF) in the plugin manager. Also you can change to the OpenGL driver which uses much faster ones. I prefer the OpenGL one, is faster hehe!
I think I will include for the next version a thing to allow you to set the kind of shadows you want.
thx for the PM., was very instructive, gonna try to include those things
btw, I have the 3.10.0 almost finished with interesting new features!
TONS of changes.
www.xnormal.net
santyhammer.blogspot.com
as usually! Feel free to test ( and remember is a beta, not a stable version! )
btw, I'm looking for a texture baking/transparency/new maps example if somebody is interested.
Just a suggestion (don't know if others would disagree), but for the 3d viewer, how about doing away with using the alpha channel for transparency/spec-lvl/gloss/etc. and giving them their own slots?
For baking, if you only want to bake ambient occlusion or a height map and not a normal map, it would be nice to bake these out independent of the normal map/ turn normal map baking on/off.
Same goes for the cavity/thickness/convexity maps as far as baking into separate maps instead of one goes.
Just a suggestion (don't know if others would disagree), but for the 3d viewer, how about doing away with using the alpha channel for transparency/spec-lvl/gloss/etc. and giving them their own slots?
[/ QUOTE ]
Unfortunally I am completely out of PS3.0 texture sampler and input registers ( 10 of 10 being used now... ) That's why need to pack some channels in the alpha
[ QUOTE ]
eah i'de like to see an option to only do ambocc and no normal, so many times i change my ambocc settings to be have things like lower quality AA and such, after rendering a good normal map and i have to rename the map to render the amb and not screw it up.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ok! Gonna change that.
[ QUOTE ]
Same goes for the cavity/thickness/convexity maps as far as baking into separate maps instead of one goes.
[/ QUOTE ]
Convexity and thickness are almost instant, what slows is the proximity. I'm gonna sepparate the proximity from all the others in the final version.
[ QUOTE ]
This might be impossible , and i might be saying a shitload of nonsense, but do you think you could add a functionality where we load the lowpoly model with the normal maps applied , and you render an AO from eaach texture with the normal map detail ? and maybe you could with it simulate cavity mapping ? its pretty much what you do in max , render an AO from the normal detail , but would be interesting to see what you can pull !
[/ QUOTE ]
Sounds interesting!
thx for the feedback
Thanks for the awesome app Jogshy
Tomorrow I will upload some new tutorials to the page.
The normalmap has been packed in memory and now occupies two-times less memory ( which allows you to generate larger maps without running out of memory ).
[/ QUOTE ]
Nice!
I do have a little problem, and I don't know if it's been brought up before (I did a quick browse through the thread and searched to the best of my ability).
The problem is the mesh is invisible in the 3D viewer when using the default Direct3D9 Graphics Driver, however when using the OpenGL 1.3 driver everything is fine and dandy. It's been like this for as far as I can remember, but seeing how it's set as default, I don't think it is working as intended.
My graphics card is an ATI X1900 XTX with the latest drivers (7.1 - but I've had this problem the past 2 or 3 driver revisions), and I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2, with everything updated to latest versions. It's always the low poly mesh that is invisible while the high poly is visible, and it doesn't matter if it has textures applied, or not.
Has anyone else run into this problem? I'm kinda scratching my head here..
The problem is the mesh is invisible in the 3D viewer when using the default Direct3D9 Graphics Driver, however when using the OpenGL 1.3 driver everything is fine and dandy.
[/ QUOTE ]
I found a nice bug in the 3.10.0 painting high poly meshes. Perhaps is that.
I just uploaded the 3.10.1 with some bugs corrections btw. Please try with this new version better.
If still doesn't work feel free to send me the problematic model to my contact mail if ya want, I promise to take a look ( and meanwhile keep using the OGL driver if goes well )