ATI Nmapper image size bug?

[voodoofactory]

I don't know much about normal mapping, but I do no a few things about game engines and ati radeon cards. First of all, you should never make any map (texture, bump, normal) a custom size; it should always be a power of 2 (ie. 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 etc.). Otherwise, the game engine just scales the texture size up to the nearest, larger power of 2.
The other thing is a sort of bug of Radeon and DirectX. For certain functions the ati cards can only use a certain size maps. For example, an ati card can't use cube maps bigger than 512x512 in most engines.
There's a chance that's it something like that, but I'm not sure... could just be a Ati Normal Mapper or driver bug.

[DDS]

hi voodoofactory, first of all, thanks for the reply!

Well, in this case, it's not a graphic problem. Let me explain: the application "ATI normal mapper", is just an application where you put a lowpoly model and the same high poly model, and then it generates a 2D tga with the normal map. It's very easy to use, and you can choose the final output size of the tga. And when I choose 1024x1024, it makes me a 512x512 tga, and, if I type a custom size (only to try if it works) of 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 (which I would reescale later), it crashes. And I'll get crazy, because a 512x512 image for a whole model is a very little image to get some nice results.

Other help is very welcome too :)

DDS.

[Dargon]

Can you type it out here how you're typing it in the Normal Mapper so we can see what might have gone wrong?

[DDS]

hey!

http://membres.lycos.fr/dreamdesigner/coses/NMerror.jpg

well this is the screenshot of the Normal mapper, anything unusual as you can see. I wonder if there's another version of the program, an earlier version maybe? this one is the 1.21 of the NormalMapperUI for MAX.

Thanks :)

[Alex McGilvray]

I've had problems using the 3dsmax built in UI,, the best thing to do is to export the nmf files and compile them with the standalone UI,, you'll also save yourself some other headaches if you do this

[Dargon]

Yeah, I've only used the command line version. (I don't think there's an in-software version for Maya)

But, you may want to try it as a 24bit targa instead of as a 16X16 ARG file, that might be the cause...

[Staffan Norling]

Slightly off topic: how do i open an .Arg file?


About your problems: i've never encountered anything like the bugs you descibe, but i'm using the command-line...

[Miguelin]

Yes, and im getting mad with normal maps.
I have make some little examples. The maya surfacetransferinfo to make the normalmap carshes maya, so i use ati normalmapper and works fine....well... i have started a model, but im making the high res model and ati normalmapper reports that "no triangles visible".

There are some restrictions to make the highres poly????????


Help!

[EricChadwick]

DDS, I've output 1024x1024 files with the command-line before. I've never used the UI though. Also may be a memory issue... 3ds max is known to be a real memory-hog. Try exiting max and using the cmd? Worked for me.

Staffan... from the readme.txt that comes with the cmd-line tool:
By default the texture is output as an 24bit TARGA image. The .arg format is an internal format used at ATI, the source files ArgFileIO.h and ArgFileIO.cpp contain code for reading and writing these images.

T.dreyer, it sounds like the high-res model and the low-res model weren't exported from the same position in space, or are different scales.

[Schmo]

I tried using the UI and in my opinion its garbage and i think you actually have less control over the results than the command line. Heres a link that should help you out if your having problems http://www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps5.html . Check the readme for options to increase the quality of your normal map with command line. But I basically just increased the number of samples per texel to 10 samples (command 2). So my basic line looks like this \NormalMapper.exe [2] low_poly.NMF high_poly.NMF size size normal_map.tga
make sure that you put in the extensions and I've found that even though the program by default exports as a tga for the normal map, if you don't include it, you won't get .tga. For the most part I leave everything at default. On a side note are you using an ATI card? because aparently there are some problems with crossing companies cards and Normal mappers that both Nvidia and ATI put out.

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