Difficulty Applying Normal

slipsius · Apr 2009

Hey all. So I created a creature for school as a final project. Had to model it then zBrush it. I had alot of problems applying the normals when I bring it into maya and unreal. It just doesnt look anything close to what it did in zBrush.

The right picture is what it looked like in zBrush, and the left picture is the normal applied in maya. I tried adjusting the bump depth and all that. but still nothing. Any help would be appreciated.

I would have gotten help from my teachers, but it was a final project, so i havent seen them since.

also, any C&C on the model itself would be great, if you want to keep going with it

Thanks.

Stefan Lipsius

HAL · Apr 2009

Hm you seem to have a lot of noise in your normal map. Can you show us some flats?

And which app did you use to bake the normal map?

Also some additional infos would be great, especially the texture size since the detail seems to be rather fine.

MikeF · Apr 2009

kinda hard to tell without seeing the normal map, but at first glance it looks like you've got your bump channel set to something other than tangent or world space (whatever one you might be using).

Ghostscape · Apr 2009

I'm not familiar with Hypershade or whatever Maya's thing is, but make sure you are loading it up as a normal map, and not as a bump map. It looks like it may be using your normal map as a greyscale heightmap/bumpmap, which is not what you want

Art-Machine · Apr 2009

There's a setting in the 'bump' node in maya that you need to select called something like "Tangent space" But i suspect your problem is in the normal map itself since it's allegedly also happening in unreal.

Show your textures and people will be better able to help.

slipsius · Apr 2009

Ok, so i went back and redid everything. reapplied everything. and it definitely looks better. I have no idea what i did to fix it, because I used all the same files, and i did have the tangent space normals option on. Im trying to make it look as bad as that last pic and cant. anyways, here are the 2 flats, as well as an updated render (with default lighting, which doesnt help my case really)

I think maybe im just expecting too much from my first real go at it, especially since i see so many professionals posting on these forums, and most of which, appear to be the high poly render, not the normals applied to the low poly. Im just use to seeing games look so good, i was expecting it to look exactly how it does in zBrush.

ah well. with practice, right?

HAL · Apr 2009

Are you sure that your settings are right? it still looks really flat and not like maya took your normals. wait a mom there was something similar if I remember it right

Yes I was right.

Normal map thread page 11

katzeimsack's specific post on the topic

Hope that helps

Ott · Apr 2009

With such absolutely terrible UVs it's unlikely you are going to get decent results in the first place.

No matter how much detail you put into your high poly or what setting you are doing in Maya, the simple fact remains you have poor UV distribution which will translate into extremely small and poor results for the normal map.

Re-UV it with some actual decent pixel density and you will see an enormous improvement overall. And don't be afraid to overlay some of those chunks to get even more space if possible.

Art-Machine · Apr 2009

Re-UV it with some actual decent pixel density and you will see an enormous improvement overall. And don't be afraid to overlay some of those chunks to get even more space if possible.

This is a misleading comment, overlaying chunks might mess up the baking process and should be avoided at bake times. What you CAN do is shrink the UVs of anything that'll be doubly overlaid on another piece, and shove them in any corner of blank space just to have them out of the way. Once the bake is done, scale those UV chunks up again and THEN stack them on top of the one part that baked fullsize.

Hard to explain, basically if you have 4 UV pieces that can use the same normals (something like those legs in your texture), shrink 3 and put them aside in the UV space. Once baking is done rescale them and place them where the 1 fullsize chunk baked so they all use the same part of the texture.

But this is something pretty advanced that you shouldn't worry about until you had at least a couple satisfactory bakes with any ol UV layout. You often have to play with normal smoothing to pull that off seamlessly on a character. I say for now keep doing UVs the way you are, just try and squeeze everything into one square area instead of so much blank space like you have there.

EarthQuake · Apr 2009

Art-Machine wrote: »

This is a misleading comment, overlaying chunks might mess up the baking process and should be avoided at bake times. What you CAN do is shrink the UVs of anything that'll be doubly overlaid on another piece, and shove them in any corner of blank space just to have them out of the way. Once the bake is done, scale those UV chunks up again and THEN stack them on top of the one part that baked fullsize.

Hard to explain, basically if you have 4 UV pieces that can use the same normals (something like those legs in your texture), shrink 3 and put them aside in the UV space. Once baking is done rescale them and place them where the 1 fullsize chunk baked so they all use the same part of the texture.

nononno do NOT do this. All you need to do is simply offset your mirrored/overlapping uv chunks 1 unit in uv space, this will make for a proper bake, and you dont ever have to put it back or do any other silly stuff. Its very easy.

It looks like your problem here may be that you're applying your normal map as a bump map, instead of a tangent space normal.

Difficulty Applying Normal

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