Mudbox Normalmap problem

#1

Hi all,

I am getting very frustrated with baking my normalmap in mudbox. Ok I will say this in order.

I have retopologised my model. So I load in the that model, which is the lores model. It matches as close to the hi-res one as possible, but the uv layout is different.

Ok the first time I did the normalmap it looked fine, apart from the colours. It seemed to capture the essence of the model well attached photo goodmap.jpg.

Ok next I did transfer paint layers, to get the paint from my hires on to my different uv map. Ok it did the colour fine, but suddenly it screwed up my normalmap. Basically all my normalmap became a right mess. I checked the uvs and they were fine. If I turned off the normal map the colour was in the right places, but if I turned the normalmap on then the normals were a mess.

So I have tried about 10 times with the normalmap now and every time it screws up. I either get black arms or the face looks like Freddy Kruger.

I have tried different settings eg furthest inside, and furthest outside and remade it multiple times the normals won’t work.

The only way the normals do work is if I don’t use the “Transfer paint layers”. Once that operation is done, my colours are fine, but my normals will not work at all.

Hope this doesn’t sound too confusing and I hope there is an expert character modeller out there who can help me.

#2

Looks like the projection distance is too high. You’re getting one finger or two projected onto the next one. Closest should be the best option overall. You might need furthest outside if you want to capture clothes. I’d do one of each and photoshop the different bits together depending on whether they’re working better with furthest inside, closest or furthest outside.

But it could also be because the extraction process defaults to assigning the normal map to the model and Max and Mudbox use different settings (green for vertical is inverted). So if you’ve extracted a Max format normal map and displayed it in Mudbox it might well be inverted.

#3

Hi RobinB,

Thankyou for those suggestions. Yeh I do see what you mean. It is annoying that mudbox does not give you more control over how the cage works.

I have got around the problem by using Xnormal. I found I had more control over the creation of the normalmap. As you say I still had some artifacts around the fingers, but I managed to get rid of them by blurring the normalmap and a little bit of clone stamping.

Thanks.

Here is the finished model, apart from the specular map which I haven’t done yet. This is rendered in 3ds max, because I can never get a good model shot in marmoset heh heh.

#4

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