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normal map seams


microxx
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Hello people,

First I let me introduce myself: My name is Orlando and I'm a freelancer located in México City. I'm a 3d generalist but lately I've been doing texturing / shading / lighting work almost exclusively. I just started with 3dcoat and of course im still learning how it works. I decided to buy it mainly because of the retopo and voxel sculpting tools, but painting and uv tools are nice as well (but I already have solutions for those areas). It's been a nice and smooth experience so far, I must say Andrew has done an amazing piece of software.

Ok, now my question: I've been playing a bit with depth painting for export as normalmaps, but unfortunately I havent been able to get rid of some visible seams (see attached images). As you can see they appear exactly where the uv seams are. I just imported the mesh from softimage (uvs were previously done), and start painting only in the depth channel. As soon as a stroke crossed a uv seam, the visible seams appeared. I must say the normal map itself is rendering fine in softimage but with the same seams that can be seen inside 3dcoat.

Is this the way it works or am I missing something? Any help will be much appreciated :)

Glad to be on board guys, I hope i can learn from those experienced users in this forum.

Orlando

post-5834-12960957468356_thumb.jpg

post-5834-12960957585735_thumb.jpg

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Welcome!

This seem to be caused by the UV mapping. Maybe the space between the UV islands is to small. If you can not figure it out, can you post your UV map layout?

Thanks for answering Gandmaster,

I attached the uv layout as you requested, I dont think it can be the space between islands though. But what you said made me wonder... is there a minimum space required between islands for per pixel painting?

Thanks,

Orlando.

post-5834-12961201269982_thumb.jpg

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Hi microxx and welcome. I agree that there is still something odd going on. I have one theory why normal maps are incorrect.

Here is a video.

As you can see when 3d-coat is painting normals it actually brakes the mesh from the

UV seam area. (you can see it better when you zoom very close to surface and turn on "View->Show displaced mesh") And if 3d-coat is using this

broken mesh to calc. normal map then the result of that would be incorrect normal map.

Here is a picture. Left side is from 3d-coat and the right side is how that area looks in normal map in blender. I'm going to send this to mantis

very soon...

post-1165-12961268975541_thumb.png

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When you merge your model into PPP mode, make sure to select full UV set smoothing and enable padding. See if that helps.

Thanks Ranger, but unfortunately is not an option for me. The renderer Im using needs the smooth but keep edges algorith, none of the other will work. What's the padding option for? is it like the bleeding option in another apps?

Thanks.

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Hi microxx and welcome. I agree that there is still something odd going on. I have one theory why normal maps are incorrect.

Here is a video.

As you can see when 3d-coat is painting normals it actually brakes the mesh from the

UV seam area. (you can see it better when you zoom very close to surface and turn on "View->Show displaced mesh") And if 3d-coat is using this

broken mesh to calc. normal map then the result of that would be incorrect normal map.

Here is a picture. Left side is from 3d-coat and the right side is how that area looks in normal map in blender. I'm going to send this to mantis

very soon...

post-1165-12961268975541_thumb.png

Thanks a lot for the video haikalle! I thinks that's exactly what's hapening here as well, because there's a visible break of the continuity of the normal map... so I guess this could be considered a bug, right? Painting normal maps on top of uv seams will result in a useless map...

Can someone else confirm this is happening?

Thanks again

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Also, is it possible to update the mesh to a new one (I need to add some polygons) but keep the UVW map that I've created in 3d-Coat?

From experience, I've been able to UV unwrap a model in 3dcoat then export it as a .obj and import to maya, add the extra mesh (while making sure everything is still combined, merged and clean up is good), go into Maya's UV texture editor and scale down the new UVs for the new areas of geometry in an an area with free space. Re-import into 3d-coat, then re-unwrap the seams on the new geometry, while still keeping your old unwrap (providing you applied UV set and so forth before the export).

This may differ depending on the 3d package you use. Also, make sure to not have too many UV shells (especially overlapping ones) when adding the new geometry, as this may crash 3dcoat unless you apply a new automatic unwrap.

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