Normals maps out of the box?

[EricChadwick]

You need to grab normals from a high-res model and bake them onto a low-res model. Render to Texture won't do this.

Some info here, kind of old.
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62364

More info.
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85016

Cool examples, although mostly about displacement instead.
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77779

[rougue 13]

just a shot in the dark here..but are you trying to bake any 2-sided meterails?? cuz that,ll error script and crash max real good..other than that you should be able to render a bump map then use photoshop to convert it into a dds. normal map..but i dont think max supports changing its normal maps..thats somthing the programmer will have to mess with in the game engine..

[chrisdejoya]

No, none of them were two-sided. I was just trying out the Normals Map option on render texture because the help file describes it as the normals map we're all so crazy about these days. And on the discreet site, it does say max 5 can render to normal maps out of the box. guess that was another marketing ploy.

Thanks for the links posm.

[EricChadwick]

You're welcome.

Max CAN render normal maps, just not properly through Render to Texture. You have to d/l the Render Normals utility (that would make it not out-of-the-box I guess).

It works, but requires a similar UV layout between the low-res and high-res objects. This can be quite limiting. Not many options in the tool either.

Another quickie option is to use Texporter... that'll put out a normal map, but be aware it's in World space, which means the resulting surface must never rotate nor deform in the game. You want something that makes Tangent or Local space maps. Also Texporter just bakes out the normals from a single object... no projection from high-res to low-res.

[chrisdejoya]

good info there. actually i had grabbed the normal mapper from sparks but was turned away from the uv requirements. they were a little too much to ask. I'd never thought of using texporter either, but since it's characters i'm working on atm, it's tanget I'm after.

I just recently grabbed the ATI normal mapper, which looks promising. any tips for us there? :) I've seen a whole backlog of your posts, so I'll be reading up on those as well.

[EricChadwick]

Cool.

There's a GUI, but I think ATI's got it on their site.

There are some mods of it, to put out 16bpc TIFFs, displacement maps, etc. Here's one...
http://subd.4t.com/normalmapper/
Mirrored also here, with added info:
http://www.seanomlor.com/mikeb/

But Kaldera is really the way to go, well worth the price. ATI's is much less friendly, requires export to another 3d format, hits are less accurate, takes a lot of stabs in the dark, can only process one highres object, doesn't give you diffuse/alpha/etc. channels.

Kaldera solves all that plus more, and it's right inside max.
http://www.mankua.com/kaldera_ug.cfm

(no I don't work for them, but I did beta-test from the start, helped guide it into the useful tool it is. And so, it is exactly what I need, works great in a production environment.)

Hope that helps.

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