DashaBolotina
04-05-2007, 11:04 PM
If someone can shed some light on this I will kneel down and call you master.
Ok I am having a very strange and highly irritating issue with generating Normal Maps in Mudbox 1.06 and having them render correctly in Maya 8.0. (havent tried max yet, but from looking at the normal maps and each of the channels it looks like the map is the problem).
Basically, I have an object that has been UVed in several patches. None of the UVs on those patches are flipped, but they are rotated in various degrees to fit them tightly into a texture space. Usual stuff. No flipped UVs, no mirrored UVs, no overlapping.
When I generate the Normal Map in Mudbox however, somehow the map thats being generated doesnt line up on the seams. I tried flipping the different Red and Green channels of the pieces but that doesnt fix the problem. If I get the seams to line up on one small part, the rest is still off.
Looking at the Red and Green channels, it almost looks like Mudbox just completely ignored the orientation of the normals in world space, and is generating the normal direction according to the UV space. For example, the Green channel is Y, and white is up and black is down. Well lets say I have a wrinkle that extends across 2 UV patches. one of the UV patches is rotated 180 degrees. What it looks like in Photoshop is that the Normal map took no consideration of the rotation of the UVs and in one of the patches the part of the wrinkle that points up is given a dark value while the lower part is given a light value.
Now that wouldnt be a problem, except the UVs arent all perfectly straight in 90 degree angles, so even inverting channels leaves seams.
Needless to say that is unacceptable, and I've been banging my head on my desk for 2 days now trying to figure out why it does it. Tried every Mudbox setting I could think of, nothing works.
Please help!
Below are the settings I used for the last Normal map, and also a screenshot of the lovely seam that this mess forms.
http://www.ashentemper.com/dasha/OMGWTF.jpg
http://www.ashentemper.com/dasha/NormalSettings.jpg
(cross posted on the mudbox forum, but no one ever goes there /cry)
Ok I am having a very strange and highly irritating issue with generating Normal Maps in Mudbox 1.06 and having them render correctly in Maya 8.0. (havent tried max yet, but from looking at the normal maps and each of the channels it looks like the map is the problem).
Basically, I have an object that has been UVed in several patches. None of the UVs on those patches are flipped, but they are rotated in various degrees to fit them tightly into a texture space. Usual stuff. No flipped UVs, no mirrored UVs, no overlapping.
When I generate the Normal Map in Mudbox however, somehow the map thats being generated doesnt line up on the seams. I tried flipping the different Red and Green channels of the pieces but that doesnt fix the problem. If I get the seams to line up on one small part, the rest is still off.
Looking at the Red and Green channels, it almost looks like Mudbox just completely ignored the orientation of the normals in world space, and is generating the normal direction according to the UV space. For example, the Green channel is Y, and white is up and black is down. Well lets say I have a wrinkle that extends across 2 UV patches. one of the UV patches is rotated 180 degrees. What it looks like in Photoshop is that the Normal map took no consideration of the rotation of the UVs and in one of the patches the part of the wrinkle that points up is given a dark value while the lower part is given a light value.
Now that wouldnt be a problem, except the UVs arent all perfectly straight in 90 degree angles, so even inverting channels leaves seams.
Needless to say that is unacceptable, and I've been banging my head on my desk for 2 days now trying to figure out why it does it. Tried every Mudbox setting I could think of, nothing works.
Please help!
Below are the settings I used for the last Normal map, and also a screenshot of the lovely seam that this mess forms.
http://www.ashentemper.com/dasha/OMGWTF.jpg
http://www.ashentemper.com/dasha/NormalSettings.jpg
(cross posted on the mudbox forum, but no one ever goes there /cry)