Reading EQs thread here about hard edges has gotten me thinking I have over over analyzed it all. I thought the new method was every single uv island, even ones from the same soft normal area (i.e. seam on cylinder side) required a hardened edge. Though you can do this at no cost and only benefit for all models, with…
Since you are talking about it, I'm jumping in the thread to ask this question which occupies my mind since a long time : why do you split the normals on your UV seams ? I don't understand the benefit. Maybe I didn't have done enough bake/models to see the interest. Do you guys have some concrete examples ? My method to…
ok so i tried with avreage cage and here is what i got, also i did run the Xnormal 3d viwer to check if my models are aligned and noticed that the low poly was using 1 smoothing group wich is not the case in 3ds max.
You have to make sure your viewport and normal map baker are in sync. xNormal uses Mikktspace, and whatever application you are using has the support that same tangent space. Here's that model in UE4, no shading artifacts, basically the same texture, wireframe, and smoothing.
both with smoothing groups.. and there is a strange thing, because on the opposite of fbx model no seams and normal map rendering correct. i thought maybe symmetry modifier inverted for other side normal, but it didn't. i checked that fbx at Unreal - no problems, so it is only in toolbag...
Thane: When you average normals, each face affects the shading of the other faces it touches. So the normal map for each face is changed to account for all the other faces near it - even if they're separated by a UV seam. The problem is, when you have a UV seam sometimes the pixels don't perfectly match up with the UV…
Interesting modeling technique, Hawk. Looks like a lot of spline work? Also are you cutting the panels straight from the body shape after the fact, not just modeling them in? Man, so much has changed since I worked in the industry. I'm just getting back into it recently and have gone down this deep rabbit hole of trying to…
"X" shaped normal map errors are because you changed your low polys triangulation from when you baked to when you brought it in engine. Non-destructively force triangulation on your model before you bake and keep that triangulation until the object is in game.
A cube is a kinda worse case scenario and the results are fine until you zoom in super close. Any part of the model that can get away with being a cube or have 90° angles isn't going to be looked super zoomed in. Also with textures those issues are even less noticeable.
Well if you're getting negative 'side affects' on organic models that outweigh the benefits you're getting (Ie the cylinder with the one hard edge on its sides from the uv seam still gets the benefit of less gradients across those two polygons on the normal map) then you'd have to compromise. In the case of an organic…