I have read through this thread briefly and I am having some trouble understanding some of it, so I was wondering if anyone could dumb it down a bit for the less technical such as myself. Now I understand that when you bake something tangent space in 3ds max that has a greater angle change than 90 degrees on one smoothing…
Hello all, my name is Christopher Diggins. I'm the SDK writer for 3ds Max. This has been a very interesting thread. I appreciate all of your hard work and patience in exploring this issue. I want to let you know that I have made a new blog post with additional information to share about normal mapping in 3ds Max involving…
Diego over at Mankua is very responsive, I think I might have suggested he create Kaldera in the first place (or not, it's been awhile) but he was very good at incorporating suggestions. You could ask him to integrate one of your models into the Kaldera demo. His setup for the demo is to limit it to specific meshes. It…
some years ago I looked into that stuff when doing the exporters for luxinia, which uses the nvmeshmender to create tangentspace (I could find references to it in the maya sdk code, too). why should the calcs be different for max renderer? Quality! in the scanline renderer you could use a more costly interpolation than in…
I would like to add one thing: Sometimes imperfections like seen on the right (teal arrow) can help a model look more real world as it could easily be a mold imperfection or a dent. In our search to make everything perfect and mathematically correct we could be stripping out the kinds of detail we try hard to build in. We…
IMO, the main advantages of using tangent space: * Because the normal is relative to the face, Z always faces up. - That means normals with more precision when data is quantized, usually to 8bit per-axis. (128 vs 256 positive Z values.) - Z can be omitted and quickly derived on-the-fly without any extra info. - Storing…
Alright! Spent too much time on this but at least now I see things a bit more clearly :D Conclusions : - Maya HQ viewport, even before the bake and without a shader, is a very good tool to spot potential bake problems likely to appear at baking time. - Max bakes might be compatible with Unreal when it comes to organics or…
Thanks guys. CW, exactly. Here's both + diff: (edit: forgot to abs the diff; scaled to x3) Xoliul, not yet. I just wanted to make sure the math works. The precision loss, when saving to 8bit / channel, shouldn't affect the end result in any significant way. CB, I don't see any of those seam related issues. It seems to work…
osman, cool. Please let me know how that goes. Eric, not at all. Feel free. Keep in mind though, the shader fix only works if you use normal maps converted by NSpace, which is prepared to output "Normal Bump" compatible tangent maps. rollin, the problem is neither one or the other. They use incompatible tangent basis. You…
Hey guys, Since we know that bakes are not absolute and that it is pointless to just 'look at them' as pretty rainbow images, but rellly are relative to the engine being used to display and or bake the maps, to how an exporter sees triangles after export, and so on and so forth, what if we do the following : -…