so i've been reading this topic from page 1 - 9. Totally love it. But i've got a couple of questions. now firstly let me make clear that i can make normal map from a HP box (soft edges) to a lp box. (yei). But what i want to know is, how far should my UV Islands be from eachother(?) so they dont bleed to another (?). I…
For clarity: -Technically it is the other way around, where you have a hard edge, you must have a UV split. (but you don't need a hard edge where there is a UV split for things to look correct). But the way most people work is they UV first While doing your UV's think not only about texturing, but where your hard edges…
Hello people of Polycount! I've been doing a lot of normal map baking recently, and this thread has improved my knowledge of the subject immensely.Thank you all so much for your contributions! I have a quick question/example that I wanted to get your opinions on... Here are a couple of windows I'm making for an exterior…
Hello everyone. I'm writing a document for my team about best practices for baking normal maps. There are a couple of things I'm still not sure about, I thought I would ask here and see what people think. I've read the wiki and a lot of this thread, but still the answers to these two questions escape me! Here goes: 1) I…
Ok! So, if I understand correctly. 1: If I use a cage mesh in Xnormal (a cage mesh which I import from Maya where I define it by hand), it overrides or makes irrelevant the smooth normals setting. 2: The cage mesh should be set to all soft/averaged edges regardless of the low-poly. 3: The low-polys hard edges should be…
Hi. I've read this post for a couple hours now and have a few questions. I didn't get through all the pages, so I may ask answered questions but I was searching for answers and decided asking might be faster. okok 1. I use 3ds max to bake my normals and AO, using projection and cages. I use Marmost to render assets and UDK…
I have a question regarding UDK and normals. EQ states that you don't NEED to introduce hard edges where you have UV splits. And it totally makes sense. If I have a mesh in Marmoset it works like a charm (I only have separate SGs where the separate UV islands are). But with Unreal I run into a problem: when I import the…
I don't think that's exactly it. The vertices are always split along UV borders, Mat ID changes, SG changes in any engine - that's true. But the split of the vertices does not automatically imply that the vertex normals should change their direction. Hence my question. In my original post I showed in the picture that, for…
From what I understand you want to always use an Average Projection. What this means for xnormal is you need to export a cage. Theres another alternative to that within xnormal but I'm spacing on it. Its a really easy alternative. The reason why you want to use an Average Projection is because the cage will ignore any hard…
Let me see if I'm finally understanding all of this: 1) Average Projection cage and Explicit Projection cage determines how the normals will bake. Average Projection does just that, it averages the normals together between the low and high poly completely ignoring any smoothing groups you apply. Explicit Projection uses…