not at all! at the end of the day, every process has some positives and some negatives. for example, i would avoid exploded baking at the cost of couple more hours to have a more realistic AO bake. if i have to do couple minutes of manual cleanup, so be it. i want a better end result AO. you mention the brink guns, but i…
First up, thanks for taking the time not just to write this awesome post but also for hanging around to answer the questions of us mere mortals. I've been battling the finer points of hard surface normal maps for years and years and, like you say, the amount of miss-information, general cluelessness and sometimes even lack…
I did zoom in on the cube a lot more than I intended to and it does look fine when seen from a bit farther. I also tested softening up the edges a little and did make it look a lot better even up closer (the seam is visible, but not noticeable from intended viewing distance). =============== Now I have another question,…
I've been following this thread since the beginning, but haven't been able to keep up with each page, so I apologize if this was answered, but How would this apply to someone that currently only works in Maya, xNormal, and UDK? Some of the information was losing me, just because of the translation from Max to Maya. I don't…
Hi! 1. I prefer 3dsmax because I don't see too much difference, and the "hit only matching material id's" is very useful. UDK and normalmaps are not the best friends, so you can't 100% hide the seams and the bad shading. 2. I don't know, because I don't have seen that video. 3. Synced workflow is when you are using a…
Except that I didn't do that. Its just a regular old UV layout, it isn't obsessive compulsively welded together to minimize seams, nor is is set up to use a lot of hard edges. For instance, if the sight was meant to go into an engine that doesn't support synced normals, it would need even more uv splits to support the hard…
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…
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…
Hey there guys i already learnt a lot of this thread, but im still struggeling with my normal maps... So i cant really show of anything here, because it just doesnt look good enough. Really annoying, but i havent found a way out. So i modeled this lamp and created a highPoly around it. Then i scaled the lowPoly so its just…
Essentially, it's because the gradient doesn't have to be accounted for as strongly. Where a normal map is that light blue colour (R/G/B:127/127/255) it means that the normal points in exactly the same direction as the interpolated vertex normal at that pixel. So the more of that colour you have, the less the normal map is…