anyone know how u could render a normal map thats in tangent space in maya… tangent space is the type of normal map that games use… ill show u some screen shots… tangent space is the kind of normal map that has the light blue purple and pink looking colors… while object space is more rainbow… i know how to render object space in maya… but trying the same method on the tangent space doesnt light the model correctly… anyone know anything at all?
-object-
-tangent-
Quick question, I’m having trouble with Gnormal. When I go and use it in the Bump slot and apply my Normal Texture, the render ends up being faceted and poor quality. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
MilitaryT0m, your tangent space map looks correct to me, if a little flat. I don’t use Maya, but I would think your problem is related to how you’re applying the tangent map in your shader… it uses a different calculation than object-space.
Jo|{eR, can you post a pic of your normal map? Also your material setup… what shader are you using (Blinn, Phong, etc.), what bump strength are you using, just the one gnormal map alone in the bump slot, what renderer, does your model have smooothing grups, etc.
after I read your post, I tried using diferent shaders other than Blinn, and it worked! thanks alot 
Right now I’m experimenting what shaders work/ look better.
Thanks again
Edit : Wow nevermind, I spoke too soon … I forgot to take meshsmooth off. Way too early in the morning to do this heh
Ill be home later after work to post the materials im using
heres the information, its really fustrating.
The Mesh im using does have shading groups, but I tried everything. I took them all off and only used one shading group etc. I tried a whole bunch of diferent combinations and still no go.
I appreciate the help.
Why not just use a specific program for outputting normals. We wrote a plugin for Max, surely someone has written a plugin for maya that does something similar by now.
I would suggest starting a new thread, you’ll get more eyeballs. Either in the 3ds max section, or the Games WIP section.
Once you do that, it would help if you posted a render.
The “noisiness” in your normal map is the edge-filtering that ORB makes for you. It basically fills the empty unused areas of your map with stretched edge colors from the used areas. This helps avoid seams when the texture is filtered in the renderer. If you had black there instead, then you’d get black pixels bleeding into your mapped areas when it’s rendered. But usually an edge filter of 4-8 pixels is enough for most renderings… might be a setting you can adjust in ORB, if it still bothers you (won’t affect the render as long as the filter is wide enough).
Hello Posm!
Can you ask your friend how to use Kaldera to render with Brazil? I get an error message when I try: “Please set the current renderer to default scanline renderer and try again.”
It’s qiute urgent for me.
Thanx in advance!
It only uses the 3ds max default scanline, because of Kaldera’s ray-casting architecture. Others have asked for this, can’t recall what the answer was. Might have been that Brazi, finalRender, etc. are not open enough, or their rendering pipelines don’t allow the functions Kaldera uses. The answer might be on Mankua’s forum, or maybe the Discreet one.
http://www.mankua.com/foro/main_e.cfm?foro=2
http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/~discreetcertifiedplugins/login
Finally got around to trying out ATI’s stuff and ran into some problems.
Downloaded Normalmapper 3.2.2 from their site. However, the exe files got stripped out courtesy of Antigen.
Hit Google and managed to find Normalmapper 3.2.1 with the executables. However, this bundle does not have an NMF exporter for Max6.
After mixing-n-matching some files, I finally got it working.
Basically, normalmapper 3.2.1 executable and nmfmax6export from 3.2.2.
Haven’t had much time to play, but thought I would toss in a quick note about that.
Hey, I’m currently using Kaldera for doing my normal maps and with the unwrap I have saved texture space by flipping the UV’s on top of one another, but by doing this when I view the normal map the areas on my model that have had their UV’s flipped are now all invereted and I can’t fix up my normal map seems!
I was wondering if someone can help me out and tell me how to preview the normal map and fix my seems without half of my model having inverted normals.
NB: It is not an option for me to un-flip my UV’s.
Flipped UVs have to be fixed by the game exporter and game engine. There is some easily-available code that helps solve this, on the NVIDIA developer site, called NVMeshMender.
Until this is implemented in the game engine, you will have shading seams. You’ll even have seams on non-mirrored UVs. For example, consider the UVs of a bipedal character, where the arm UVs are cut off at the shoulder, and the arm UVs are laid out vertically. Usually the chest UVs would also be vertical. But this causes a normal-mapping seam between the arm and chest, since the upper edge of the arm UV is horizontal, while the shoulder edge of the chest UV is vertical. This is without any mirroring. Because these two edges are at different angles, the normal map on either side of this seam will get different colors, signifying different directions for their normals, thus you’ll get a shading seam.
However, once your game engine uses the right kind of code to correct these differences, the seam should disappear (assuming there wasn’t a seam in the high-res model, and assuming you’re properly padding the edge texels).
The code basically duplicates vertices along the UV edges and massages their normals, which rotates the texel normals to match one another when the surfaces are rendered in-game.
(wow, I really need to update this thread)
I understand that the “flipped” normal is an engine-issue. But is there a way to have max (7) display it correctly? I’m using Metal Bump9 (like everybody else, I guess…)
Thanks.
As I understand it, no. You would need a custom modifier (or utility) that would massage the vertex normals of the model. These new normals are then used to re-orient the per-pixel normals into a world-space orientation so the surface can then be lit properly.
I hear there are other options besides MetalBump, but I’m not really using normal mapping anymore (at least not pre-computed normal maps) so I’m not up to date on display techniques in Max.
i’d like to use max7 to creat normal map,i think it’s convience and powerful
for creating normal map in max7 some tool are more power
*project modify:i think the cage max7 offered has more control expecially you can adjust cage’s shape that more pricise.of couse it’s functions more than creat the normal map you can creat uv’s from the high-res model too.
*render to texture:it can autouvmap the low-res model’s uv’s and apply the result from the project modify and creat all kinds of channel maps(diffuse,normal,specular…)
i’v used Kaldera i think it’s powerful and esay to understand,but i chose to use the defaule tool max7 offered
sorry to my poor english and welcome to communication with me
I’m still in max5.1 here. I’m interested in upgrading at some point, but I’m not ready yet, and v5 works fine for what I’m doing.
From what I hear, there is one major problem with the v7 normal mapper. This thread provides some details:
Normal Map problems
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=3&Number=4620&page=0&fpart=all
For now, you cannot display correctly the normal mapping correctly in the viewport. You can use the material Normal Map that is installed with Kaldera in the bump slot to render the NM, the result will be correct, unlike the viewport’s ones.
I’m trying to start a library of Normal Map shapes that can be used to paint maps in Photoshop. So far, I’ve created a half-sphere Nmap, multiplied it on an image in Photoshop, and used it to create an object with a bunch of round dents. It works as long as you use tangential mapping.
I’d like to come up with simple grooves, protrusions, rivets, cracks, etc. Let me know if you guys have any examples in this area.
Sometimes I paint details in grayscale and use NVIDIA’s filter to convert to a normal map. Then use overlay mode to mix it with the base normal map. Works great.
Here’s a thread about how to do it…
Blending Hi-poly Normal Maps with 2D Normal Maps http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=20029&an=0&page=1#20029