Thanks EQ and metalliandy. I thought there may have been an option to dither an image similar to a compression setting depending on the image format you save as. From what you're saying sounds like dithering automatically happens when you convert from 16 to 8 bit and is independent of final 8 bit image format. Cool - will…
Yeah, me personally, I'm not a proponent of the "everything must be 16 bit" workflow. I know some guys swear by creating all their PSDs in 16 bit, but it's significantly less efficient in terms of resource,s especially if you're working with big files, and only shows clear and obvious benefits with certain map types like…
Right, it was intentionally contradictory. Its meant simply to maintain perspective, sometimes all the little things that we obsess over when viewing assets untextured matter much less in the end result. Still, I would recommend baking in 16 bit and down-converting because there are no real disadvantages and it only takes…
I don't really get what you mean by that, can you explain it a bit further, please? As mentioned by EarthQuake, 3ds Max dithers the normal maps, even if exporting in 8 bpc. Why is that? Do I have to test this behaviour for every software now or is it better to export maps in 16 bit manually to convert them to 8 bpc…
Yeah, I should clarify by saying that 16 bit textures aren't supported by most standard compression methods, which is a big reason why they aren't used. Really there is no technical reason why they can't be used, they just take up a lot more texture memory, which will be less of an issue going forward. I could see 16 bit…
Of interest to most who will read this thread, I wrote an extensive tutorial that covers this topic and many other common baking issues. It's geared towards baking in Toolbag, but most of the Basics and Best Results sections apply universally. Check it out on the Marmoset site:…
Here are a variety of files to play with, both the high and low files for each of the test cases meshes I've created and a variety of baked maps. These are all baked with XN, so set tangent space to XN if previewing in TB2. Also of note, in 2.06 the tiff loader is broken and won't import 16/32 bit files correctly, this is…
Hi, Sorry for posting on this old topic but the techniques shown here are very important (anyway it's sticked in the front page) and game artists should be aware of this and always bake on a 32-16 bit depth raw color space then generate an 8 bit normal map or vertex curvature or displacement with dithering. I have tried to…