The xnormal curvature map thing has already been discussed. Combining two maps is again, work that needs to be redone if you get change requests so its a slow and clunky workflow. There are some minor ray errors on some of the buttons, but nothing on the image you're quoting. The ray errors there could easily be fixed by…
Yes, I am using a cage, just double-checked and I'm indeed exporting with 1 single smoothing group in the whole cage. My low poly has differente smoothing groups on each shell, in fact, I tried: 1. No hard edges 2. Hard edges on EACH shell 3. Hard edges on 80~ degree edges, and same smoothing group(even if different uv…
I think you should try experimenting with this a bit, you seem to be getting wrapped up in technical information, much of this should be apparent if you try. Some more info: 1. average normals in xnormal would override your mesh normals, you should not do this 2. you can use hard edges wherever you have uv seams, you don't…
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…
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…
I think it's silly to think of it as "hard edge vs 1 smoothing group" like these are the only options or that 1 smoothing group means anything at all in the first place. Think about it in terms of how extreme the mesh normals are instead. The more extreme the mesh normals are, the stronger the gradients will be in the…
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…
Hello, everyone! Think I'd better ask it here, then open a new tread. So I'm trying to make my first bake, nothing special for the beginning, just a cube, but I'm already stuck and puzzled with it. Sorry, for newbie questions in advance.-) So I have a cube and bake normals in tangent space. As far as I understand, they…