viewing normal maps in maya 6 problems

[ThE_SP]

Heya,

I've managed to get it working, all thought Maya is displaying the UV with seams. I guess the most obvious thing, that I forget to do is put the viewport into texture mode(6).

Hope that helps,
Shawn

[green556]

did everything but still everything is black. it did give a warning about calculating baked textures. Am I suppose to install any plugins/sw to allow cg in maya6 viewports?(i thought it is incoporated already)

these seams you were refering to, are you talking the dark edges around the all the UV edges? I think you are suppose the extend the edges of the normal map in photoshop to fix it.

[_vine_]

I have the same problem with Maya 6. I'm using an Nvidia 6800 video card as well. I would tend to think it could possibly be a video card problem but I have a Quadro 1000 series card at work and it has the same issue as well.

When I turn on high quality rendering I get the model completely black, although I can see the normal map is appearing on the surface if I rotate around the model and look at it from an angle.

Also, when I try rendering out the normals they render out in a washed out white to light grey image. I'm not as worried about the render because that is probably just a simple setting I didn't turn on somewhere, but the black texture in the viewport is worrysome.

The normal maps I'm using come from Zbrush as well as through Maya's Transfer Surface Information plugin.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ThE_SP]

Hmm, I guess the most obvious question is what type of normal map are you generating? I had the same issues when I used a non-tangent map(has RGB colors). I created a map with tangent(purple/bluish) clicked and havn't has any real issues since. I'm using a Nvidia 5200ti.

Cheers,
Shawn

[_vine_]

Perhaps it is the normal map itself that I'm using.

When I create the map I am just turning on the "NormalMapFlipVert" option in the Export preferences.

Also, I am using "Tangent", and "Adaptive" on with a resolution of 1024. Otherwise, every other setting is at default. I couldn't find any other settings that I need to adjust in the Practical Guide or any other tutorial.

Also, another thing I'm curious about is the maps (both .psd and .tif) versions that are exported are 8-bit. I thought ZBrush was supposed to export 16-bit images. I've tried using both 8 and 16 bit versions with no change in Maya.

I hope this helps explain the problem further.

[ThE_SP]

I don't have anything flipped for normal mapping. I have had no luck using 16 bit normal or displacment maps with MR. Havn't really messed with it for real-time rendering though. If you want, I can see if I can get it working on my end. shawn@digitalartisan.ca if you want.

Cheers,
Shawn

[_vine_]

I made one last desparate attempt that seems to have worked. My model has multiple maps on it (one for head, one for body).

It seems that Maya's problem is in viewing two normal maps for the same piece of geometry. My solution was to extract and separate the head from the body. Apply my normal to that (and it worked). I then applied the body normal (and that worked separately).

Then I tried combining the two pieces of geometry and the maps still showed. Then I merged the edges and still had no problems.

Before I would just select the head faces and apply the head map, and then select the body faces and apply the body map. I remember back around Maya 4 there were problems with this happening in every type of file map, but Alias said they fixed it for version 5. Apparently, the problem still exists with version 6.

This might be a workaround others can use for multiple normal maps on a single piece of geometry in Maya.

Hopefully this helps someone.

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