Hey JedTheKrampus, ah yes I am aware of the hard edges as I have not smoothed it out yet. It's in-between the blocking/high-poly stages :) It'll be smooth soon though lol. Thanks, Ross
Did you check your smoothing groups? You say, if you make all faces hard, the problem goes away. Sounds like you have one smoothing group applied to the whole model.
Thankyou for your reply kw71 but I found out what it was. I didn't had a smooth group to the object before I exported it in 3ds max. Once I added a smooth group the problem fixed.
Remember to use the smooth tool and the move tool (at a large size) a lot at this point, change the smooth strength to maybe about 30-ish. Work on the jawline, chin and basic shape of the top of the forehead/back of the head.
The way I do it it set the weight/crease in Max on my low before exporting, just hit Crease when you import it in Zbrush, smooth it like 2 levels, smooth your edges, and go on
We just smoothed the vert colours where needed and tried to keep subdivision somewhat consistent. We were a stylized game though so smooth gradient blends was what I was after in the art direction.
Looks like you need to play with your smoothing groups a bit more, seems like there are a few smoothing errors. Also, i would look into mirroring some of those bits that are identical on both sides.
I were refering to the circled area here. Due to the harsh edge of the shadow I assumed it'd be a smoothing-error. If that's also in the AO, then you might just want to smooth that part out a bit. Cheers
What shading method do you use in your path tracer? Normals are usually baked at a smooth shaded mesh. And so you should use smooth shading in your engine too. Then the normals should fit.
OMG such a dumb problem. I had the mirror objects as one smoothing group before export for unreal. When the mirror polygon is its own smoothing group the world normal is flat and the reflection is correct.