Hard edge normals

[knj]

hi guys, i have a problem with baking normals on lP with hardegdes

i never did hardsurf's before so this is kinda new to me, and my issue is a common one as i see in the internet and other forums, but i did as ppl said and still have problems, so i'm not exactly sure what i'm doing wrong

so this is the easiest example:

my HP (beveled cube)

my LP (hard edged cube) with uv layut every piece on seperate island with lots of uv space

using x normal, using CAGE, i'm baking normals,

in maya it looks great

no seams, looks nice

in UDK that same model that same normal (with flipped green chanel to match the UDK space)

looks like shieeet

i could use soft normals on that cube and it will look ok in UDK, but using more comples geo, when normals are soft the shading is crappy as hell

what to do guys, help

[PogoP]

Just bevel those edges. Your low poly has to reflect your high poly in shape as much as possible, so try and round off the edges as much as it is in the high poly, without being so... high poly. The low poly cube you have at the minute has some very hard edges and there's no way that your normal map will be able to hide that.

[mjens]

1) make sure to set one smoothing group on whole model

2) edit normals where you've chamfered the edges

3) it looks like known "udk seam problem" - check polycount:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77539

[Bunglo]

Just bevel those edges. Your low poly has to reflect your high poly in shape as much as possible, so try and round off the edges as much as it is in the high poly, without being so... high poly. The low poly cube you have at the minute has some very hard edges and there's no way that your normal map will be able to hide that.

I don't think that beveling the edges is really necessary for something like this. I just did a quick test bake in max of the same thing using a xoliul shader to render in the viewport:

You can try beveling them though and see if you get a better result but honestly, it looks like the green channel is flipped. I know you said you flipped it already but maybe that wasn't necessary?

I'm not familiar enough with xnormal to help but you're going to need to read up with how it works in relation to UDK.

1) make sure to set one smoothing group on whole model

If he has 90 degree edges (assuming you're talking about the lp) and bakes with 1 smoothing group, he'll get similar results to the UDK shot.

EDIT: Here's the same cube with 1 smooth group:

[knj]

bunglo can you post screen of that lp cube, only shaded without normal map ? (the one that is ok)

[e-freak]

you need to rebake the normalmap after you put everything in the same smoothing group!

[knj]

in maya (i thing in max it will look the same) i have no problem with that, the problems are in the UDK !

and i'm not sure what do you mean by one smoothing group (i used max just a lil )

[e-freak]

set all edges to soft edges.

[knj]

here is a lil bit more complicated piece, i used bevel here, this is the best resoult so far, still there are some seams, but i could live with this, but the polycount on my whole lp will be to high ;/

[knj]

set all edges to soft edges.

doing so was my first attempt working with these geo, but it doesn't look good, the insides are trying to look round not flat like it should

[Bunglo]

bunglo can you post screen of that lp cube, only shaded without normal map ? (the one that is ok)

It's just a cube with 3 smoothing groups applied to it (so all hard edges, think that's what they're called in maya) and a flatten mapping operation on the UVs (none of the UVs are stitched together.)

you need to rebake the normalmap after you put everything in the same smoothing group!

lol I did rebake it We all know that non-synced bakers don't work well with 1 smoothing group on them sharp angles.

Knj, you're best bet would be to look up baking tips with xnormal for udk. I don't use xnormal or maya but there's no program that has a synced baker with UDK (so far as I know anyway) and there's various things that need to be kept in mind when creating an asset for udk.

[knj]

so yea you did exactly what i did, but in udk blehhh

[knj]

checking the face/vertex normals. but looking ok (?)

[Bunglo]

Here's the same cube and bake in UDK:

I didn't do anything else, default .ase export settings, didn't flip the green channel of the normal, tc_normamap compression settings on import, compression no alpha on import.

Here;'s the material setup to, as basic as it gets:

@Knj new post:

Yeah, normals look fine, have you tried re-flipping the green channel yet?

[knj]

Bunglo yes i did, but the problem wasn't there (thanks to you i was looking again in to ase exporter)

and FUCK, the problem was couse i didn't have turned on the option "obey hard FCK edges" !!

lol, and thats it, now its how it sould be

(the one of the left is with this option NOT checked)

thanks guys for all the help and support and again LOLz at me