Wrong normals

[michalis]

Well, retopo (just for test not a good one). A 5M voxel model. Retopo room was so slooow 4 frames, my eyes... on a 16 thread xeon mac... Anyway I exported it to blender and please, see how wrong normals are, never show a so fatel error though from zbrush or any other app. There aren't any seams were the problem exists. Two months in 3dc now and still have these nonsense output. I like voxel sculpture, I usually export it as triangulated mess, do re topology in zbrush, sculpture and UVs there or in blender. I return to 3dc for some texture paint but never managed to do it as some tutorials say. Always wrong normal maps, crashes... so many crashes. The mac version doesn't work for me. So sorry. A 5 M voxel and this app is finished. Cant move UV islands, waiting waiting, crashing, my eyes hurt, just a moment, this supposed to run on a mac pro, right?

You have to see how new blender 2.5 mac 64 bit build performs on this machine. Zbrush as a 32bit app preforms great too

Two blender renders, one without normals the other with normal map on. Always this problem with normals. What I posted already in the WIP thread, used normals and displacement from zbrush, never from 3dc.

Its that I like voxels... and texture painting... nothing else here. Retopo doesn't work for me, this is a major problem.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Please check Edit->Preferences->Normal map export.

Try both cases there, what of them will give better normalmap.

As I know Coat's normalmaps work greatly with Blender.

[michalis]

Thanks Andrew. About normals, its somehow my fault, I'm confused, I exported the auto unwrapped UVs. I had unwrapped this manually but somehow this wrong unwrap exported. The auto unwrap doesn't work for me. How can it, when some islands overlap each other and when trying to repack them 3DC just crashes .

I'm confused, I really need a 'good' tutorial about UV in OSX build 3DC. What I had from the existing tutorial was: "we'll not talk about UV unwrapping, lets see new UV tools"

Well I had 25k quads here. Its a portrait. So did the usual, one island (T style cut, you know). CAN YOU MOVE 25k island in UV room? Not here, crash again, .

Till then, retopo and UVs in blender and zbrush, you can move millions of vertices in UV blender editior. Now, just a 1M voxel tri model, exported from voxels palette, retopo in zbrush, sculpt details there, import and texture in 3DC. Thats all. Voxels is a 'real' sculpt experience, but I can live without it.

I must say that my mac pro can't handle a 5M voxel model in retopo room. If it works fine on a pc, I really don't care. You have to make it friendly for a mac or to stop the mac version.

Blender is a friendly mac app, I'll keep saying this just to show that this is possible.

Update: As usual I found what's wrong here without any help. I should not expect to find this, written in a tutorial...

My model was ~1.5 M as voxels. Subdivided as ~4.2M and turned to surface mode for some details. ITS IMPOSSIBLE to do retopo (2-4 frames per sec) in retopo room. I returned to voxels mode and now I can do retopo (its a ~5M now and works smoothly). So, NO RETOPO BEING IN SURFACE MODE. On the mac build anyway. Who says so? Am I alone?

Create padding: This has a value of 64 by default. A complete mess when too many islands exist, especially for normal maps. Who says so, am I alone here?

I lost my temper now, sorry.