Nope, Softimage but the process of building the cage is the same in all applications. The push operator does nothing more then moving all the vertices along their corresponding surface normals, so selecting all of them and moving them along their normal does the same like a push operator.
Quack, i tried to use less smoothing groups and seams (see pic)... the effect is better, but seams still present in UE, but no in toolbag.. :( i can use 1 smooth group for everything, but gradients on flat surface in normal map are killing the whole point. xnormal: no seams.
i guess, but i am not restricted to hard-surface, organic, etc. i do it all. anyways, thanks for the write up. its always interesting to see other worflow and you were right, i did learn something but i will have to figure out when to use it :D
I baked a normal map for my hard surface model and I got pretty good results without major problems. I'm somewhat happy with my results. I triangulated my LP and CAGE models before baking them in xNormal. When I applied the normal map for my original quad version of the model just for the sake of testing, some odd shadings…
Thanks zac for your answer, i have a good workflow everything is going fine but when i have this type of surfaces i dont think one edge would make it good enough...because if i add one edge on the right side then i will have a bad gradient between and not a nice solid color.
Ahh ok, thanks for the feedback. I feel like things are starting to fall into place at long last. I'm going to play around and try drill some of this home but it's definitely making sense now. Your commitment to spreading the good word of proper hard surface projection practice is extremely appreciated :P much love!
So there are times when you have to sacrifice vertex points for a clean bake when working with hard surfaces where the normal effects an edge? Am I correct? I'm sure there are exceptions where baking where a seam will result doesn't matter if you can't see it, but generally there is no other way to go about a clean bake at…
final_fight You might also need to check the edges on your high poly model. If they are too tight and take only like 1-2 pixels in your normal map after the bake, this could be the reason why dDo can't generate a proper curvature map. I use Quixel Suite a lot for my current hard surface project and I never had this problem
Essentially, it's because the gradient doesn't have to be accounted for as strongly. Where a normal map is that light blue colour (R/G/B:127/127/255) it means that the normal points in exactly the same direction as the interpolated vertex normal at that pixel. So the more of that colour you have, the less the normal map is…
I'd say the more the normal map has to compensate the low poly, the more shading issue you will get with an unsynced workflow. And indeed the dds compression (and even 8bit format) is an issue, i wouldn't recommand to have these large gradient on big surfaces for the best result. Depends of the size of the thing in the…