Someone else had this problem. Unless you didn't push the wireframe button my mistake it's probably your graphic card, old ones don't support normal maps from what I've heard.
Try rendering it to see if the normal map is being there.

__________________
http://www.andrei313.com

Yeah I read this was hapenning to someone else due to an old graphic card but I know thats not the problem because I have had the normal maps show up before. The dice normal map worked fine. I was normal mapping my crate for the comp and for some reason its having that wireframe problem.

Then this is very strange. It is obviously a viewport rendering problem, something to do with DirectX. I don't know what to say... make sure that in the Preferences menu, under Viewports you have the right Driver setup = Direct3D with DirecX 9.0.
Also, if you still have to dice try to check if that ones is displaying in wireframe now too.

__________________
http://www.andrei313.com

Any reason why when I hit render to texture it renders a black window? Usually it shows the shaded stuff with the red or whatever but now its just rendering black. Im doing it the same way I did my dice but for some reason its not working out this time.

Not really sure why this happens in your case. It could be:
- you have a light in the scene... check to see there are no lights
- you have overlapping UVs... if so, move them out of the way and leave just one set in the rendering window
- you have flipped UVs... you can use a checker map with some text on it to see if some UVs are flipped

But check to see how the normal map looks. It doesn't matter what is rendered in that window as long as it isn't red in it If there is red you have intersections between your cage and the highpoly. Even if that window is black the normal map could be ok.

__________________
http://www.andrei313.com

Look what happens when I render the map:


I would really appreciate any help you can give me.

I have never seen something like this It's like the renderer is showing both the low and highpoly in the render and somehow they overlap. How does your normal map look like ?

__________________
http://www.andrei313.com

Well, first of all much thanks for the tutorial. My problem isn't the viewport display but rather the normal map that max actually outputs...

http://minion.evildunn.com/stuffs/Ho...Normals_00.jpg
http://minion.evildunn.com/stuffs/Ho...Normals_01.jpg

I could just paint 128,128,255 over the flat surface and correct the shadow line in photoshop but I feel like I shouldn't have to =\ If anyone knows whats wrong I'd greatly appreciate the info.

I noticed that the further away the cage is from the model the more this gradients show on the normal map. Try to make that distance as small as possible. Another thing you could try is testing how it looks with and without smoothing groups on the lowpoly while you make the normal map.

__________________
http://www.andrei313.com

I've got a problem.
When I've got the dice made in a green color, the normal maps render green, and shaded, as if nothing "normal mappish" is being made. any thoughts on this?
tia