Posts by -HP-

-HP- · E3 2010 -HP- June 14, 2010 at 9:15 PM

http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6265343/

wow, just wow.

-HP- · E3 2010 -HP- June 14, 2010 at 6:21 PM

http://www.gametrailers.com/e3/livefeed/microsoft

It's started folks!

-HP- · Smoothing Group Trouble... Help needed! -HP- June 14, 2010 at 5:44 PM

Try chanfering your geometry!

-HP- · What have you purchased recently? -HP- June 14, 2010 at 5:42 PM

Really need to replay it, and this time im blowing up with megaton, mwahahah!

-HP-

Quote from dux

I'm about as interested in 3D as fingering some guys asshole.

-HP- · Smoothing Group Trouble... Help needed! -HP- June 14, 2010 at 11:01 AM

Wtf Nysuatro?!

Anyway PogoP, yeah, the first bakes are always a fuckign nightmare, you never know what you're doing wrong. Bottom line is, you will never be able to bake a perfect normal map with perfect shading, try to live with the fact. What you can do, is try to minimize the shading errors. There's a few tricks for that.

- Chanfer most of your 90º problematic edges on your LP, and play around with your smoothing groups, try to have as few as possible. (You wont need many due to the chanfers)

- Play with smoothing groups, add a smoothing group change in places where the player will most likely wont notice, like back areas, etc. Remenber tho, each smoothing group transiction will be a very hard edge on your normal map, therefor breaking the smooth shading, therefor avoid placing one in noticable places.

- Use only one smoothing group for the whole LP, and bake a Object Space Normal map. (All the shading will be read from the normal map normals, and not from the polygons normals)

- Don't forget your UV's also pay an important role, each shell UV will be a hard edge on your normal map, that's why you should try and sync the smoothing group hard edges with your UV boundaries.

I'd recomend you practice with a cube. Bake, rebake, rebake, rebake, rebake and rebake! Test with diferent settings!

Make like a dice or whatever. Then chanfer the edges of the LP, mess with the UV's, mess with the smoothing groups, etc. I too jumped to more complex shit when I started and I wish I didn't, it's a lot of head aches.

And yeah, use xnormal, I know it's a bit of a pain having to export the HP and LP to .obj's, but it's much easier not having to mess around with cages!

I don't want to overflow you with info, but when you have some time for some good old reading, here:

Normal Mapping

http://www.bencloward.com/resources_tutorials.shtml

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm

http://www.gameartisans.org/gamecon/tutorials/tut_3.htm

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/4693-post74.html

viewtopic.php?t=6806

http://saschahenrichs.de/midsizedocs/nvidiatut.html

http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/arti ... lmaps.html

http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#he ... 1698abbf3f

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/n ... flow_2.htm (workflow)

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=51088 ( tutorial: fixing mirrored normal map seams )

http://www.dregsld.com/tutorialfiles/normedit.html (Adding more detail to baked NM's)

http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.ph ... stcount=12 (Combine normal maps in photoshop)

http://www.evermotion.org:8080/exclusiv ... L_MAPS.pdf (Normal maps, and bakings *Must read*)

PS. Don't forget to use a viewport shader, Xoliul's 3DS Max Viewport Shader is the one I recomend.

But the 3ps guys recently release a much more powerful one, that will probably help you get rid of most if not ALL of your shading errors, check polycount and http://www.3pointstudios.com/3pointshader_about.shtml

PPS. Mmm... with a second look at your screenshot, I think your normals are flipped. Go to PS, and flip the green channel. (Or if your using Xoliul's shader, flip the normal map) It should fix most of your problems, but there still is some shading errors there'.

-HP- · Post Your Pic Extravaganza 2010 -HP- June 13, 2010 at 11:27 PM

He has balloons for tits, pay no attention. And yeah, as an extra, he's french.

-HP- · Deus Ex 3 -HP- June 13, 2010 at 10:59 PM

Quote from Chimeray

Too bad I haven't played any game in the series, and I really can't remember why I hadn't picked it up back then o.OMaybe it still isn't too late
(

Go play DX1, now!

-HP- · StarCraft II -HP- June 13, 2010 at 10:25 PM

Quote from Seldoon182

External Content www.youtube.com

Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.

Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.