Muddy normal maps

[philnolan3d]

Perhaps some of you have had better luck and know what I'm doing wrong. My model with it's normal map applied looks dirty or muddy instead of clean, soft shapes. The normal image is 2048x2048. The map seems to look OK to me. It was baked with the Texture Baking Tool by loading the low poly model into the tool and baking from the voxel model. Any ideas? It even looks this way in a LightWave render.

[Javis]

I've heard a few people mention that they are having issues with the texture baking tool lately. I haven't used it in a bit so I can't say for certain, but try using the texture baking tool with a few smaller text objects and see how that goes.

Are you by chance using PTEX to bake from?

[philnolan3d]

No its a uv that I created in 3dc, then tweaked in lightwave. Then used the texture baking tool to bake these. I'm still playing with it, I think the best option might be to just deal with the mess using the eraser tool at best as possible. Hopefully she won't look like she was was working in a coal mine when I'm done.

[philnolan3d]

Alright I just went in with the eraser and cleaned up a lot of the ugliness. I may have lost some detail so I may have to go in and add it back in.

[pencil-head]

I'm not sure i can help you solve your problem (i'm new to 3dcoat), but i think i know what the problem is base on experience with other programs.

It seems to me that you low rez mesh has been subdived before projection. But the problem is that the uv's have been subdivide but not smoothed in the process (does that make sense?).

Try projecting again and play with the uv smoothing options. Also double check that the uv's are actually welded too. Maybe the uvs broke somewhere in the process off bringing it from lightwave.

But then again i could be way off, just throwing ideas at you.

[manticor]

Perhaps some of you have had better luck and know what I'm doing wrong. My model with it's normal map applied looks dirty or muddy instead of clean, soft shapes. The normal image is 2048x2048. The map seems to look OK to me. It was baked with the Texture Baking Tool by loading the low poly model into the tool and baking from the voxel model. Any ideas? It even looks this way in a LightWave render.

Ok not a direct answer to your question but you will get a far superior normal map with no seams or problems using Xnormal...

[Andrew Shpagin]

Have you tried to merge for PPP instead of texture baking tool?

[philnolan3d]

Ok not a direct answer to your question but you will get a far superior normal map with no seams or problems using Xnormal...

Twitter people kept suggesting xNormal too. I never liked it before but I tried it again anyweay. All it gave me was a mangled mess of triangles.

Have you tried to merge for PPP instead of texture baking tool?

I can't merge because I need two UV maps and the retopo room won't create two. I posted that as a feature request because of this project.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Twitter people kept suggesting xNormal too. I never liked it before but I tried it again anyweay. All it gave me was a mangled mess of triangles.

I can't merge because I need two UV maps and the retopo room won't create two. I posted that as a feature request because of this project.

But you may merge in 2 stages. That will result with 2 uv sets

But second stage requores that first merged object should be hidden.

[philnolan3d]

I will have to look into that.. If I could do it without baking a normal map out I'd be VERY happy.

Edit: Ohhh No I can't because I had to do a lot of work on the UV maps in LightWave to make the multiple UVs since I couldn't make them in the retopo room. Now I have the UVs just the way I like them. I made one map for the symmetrical stuff that gets overlapped, like the face, and one for the rest.

Ugh, this is too much hassle, maybe I'll just use one big UV instead of 2. Hopefully this will be made easier in the future.

Since I'm making one big map it would be nice if I could pick an arbitrary number for the size, instead of being stuck with 2048 or 4096. It would be nice to pick something in between.

Edit: I just noticed you can pick your own texture size, that must be new I've been wanting it for a long time.

[ekunzendorf]

Hello All!

One thing I've noticed is that when there is a sharp edge as there is in your eyelids, and you merge for PPP, there will be some artifacting I had this happen with the feet on a character I had sculpted. To fix the problem, I had to add some edges to soften the hard edge before I merged by adding edge loops. This caused the hard edge to snap to the model and resulted in no artifacts on the resulting normal map. Hope this helps.

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

[philnolan3d]

Good tip. BTW I did end up using just one normal map in 3DC. Merging to PPP just looks a thousand times better than the texture baking tool.

[michalis]

In my opinion the tex baking tool used the low poly mesh as a source, or even mixed it somehow with the voxel mesh. I also complained to Andrew that I can see wireframe as artifact when exporting hi-res mesh from MV to blender or zbrush. I thing you have a similar problem here Phil.