cursedDice
10-17-2007, 02:34 PM
I've been using XSI for all my modeling and UVing needs since Softimage started selling XSI Foundation for $500. In the past six months I have become highly interested in pursuing a career in environmental and prop creation for games, so I started teaching myself XSI's Ultimapper since creating normal and occlusion maps from high polygon geometry is such a huge part of next-gen game art. I was mostly successful at learning it from the docs and the excellent Digital Tutor's dvd, 'Next-Generation Game Techniques in XSI'. I still have a couple questions regarding the use of the Ultimapper as well as a question about previewing normal, specularity, and reflection maps in real-time in XSI's perspective viewport (closest approximation to a game engine within XSI, as far as I know).
Firstly, for the life of me, I cannot figure out what XSI's equivalent of a 'cage' (like Max and xNormal use) when baking your normal maps. 90% of the time this doesn't matter. It only matters when I baking around a cylindrical object, or I am baking an area of my mesh where the rays that are cast overlap (hard to explain...) Here is an example of a map I baked showing this problem (notice the wavy, squiggly lines):
http://www.curseddice.com/pcImages/wigglyExample.jpg
And here is an image from Ben Mathis' excellent tutorial for Max that shows how using a cage can fix this problem with cylinders (visit his site at www.poopinmymouth.com (http://www.poopinmymouth.com..its) ...its a portfolio site...I swear).
http://www.curseddice.com/pcImages/normal_16.jpg
Notice how there is a low-polygon object, a high poly, and the cage...and the cage fixes the 'squigglies'. This is the 'effect' I am looking for in XSI. I am having the worst time figuring this out.
I am also curious how to create real-time previews of my normal/spec/reflect maps in the viewport (similar to how Maya works...set up your material, then set the viewport to High Quality Rendering, and you have a preview). I am aware of the option within the Ultimapper to create a preview, but that seems clunky and is hard to control or modify. I am looking for a way to set it up in the RenderTree and have the viewport display the real-time preview.
Thanks for the help everyone.
Daniel Kaltenbach
Firstly, for the life of me, I cannot figure out what XSI's equivalent of a 'cage' (like Max and xNormal use) when baking your normal maps. 90% of the time this doesn't matter. It only matters when I baking around a cylindrical object, or I am baking an area of my mesh where the rays that are cast overlap (hard to explain...) Here is an example of a map I baked showing this problem (notice the wavy, squiggly lines):
http://www.curseddice.com/pcImages/wigglyExample.jpg
And here is an image from Ben Mathis' excellent tutorial for Max that shows how using a cage can fix this problem with cylinders (visit his site at www.poopinmymouth.com (http://www.poopinmymouth.com..its) ...its a portfolio site...I swear).
http://www.curseddice.com/pcImages/normal_16.jpg
Notice how there is a low-polygon object, a high poly, and the cage...and the cage fixes the 'squigglies'. This is the 'effect' I am looking for in XSI. I am having the worst time figuring this out.
I am also curious how to create real-time previews of my normal/spec/reflect maps in the viewport (similar to how Maya works...set up your material, then set the viewport to High Quality Rendering, and you have a preview). I am aware of the option within the Ultimapper to create a preview, but that seems clunky and is hard to control or modify. I am looking for a way to set it up in the RenderTree and have the viewport display the real-time preview.
Thanks for the help everyone.
Daniel Kaltenbach