ye, thanks, but it's a project on all sorts of mapping, so it's not the result I need, it's the normal mapping I need

hey Andrei and gang,

I'm having a hard time figuring out why the side ridges wont show up properly:



someone in irc mentioned to try flipping the UV coordinates, I went in and tried it (not sure if i did it correctly) but nothing changed really. Any ideas?

EDIT!

Well I figured it out thanks to Tyler (gamedev)'s new video tutorial. I had selected bitmap instead of Normal Bump on the first step. Still needs some work but I think I can clean it up in photoshop.
It sure does feel good to get my feet wet in normal mapping.


EDIT 2!
woot

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Andrei, great tutorial.

Might help to say that after using the Nvidia filter, you don't need to delete pixels. A better/easier way is to perform a Levels adjustment on the layer... setting the Channel dropdown to Blue, and the Output Levels to 0 and 127... then changing the layer to Overlay. This way you're altering the normals without losing any strength (noticeable if your layer overlaps mesh details below it).

It's also wise at the end to merge all to a new layer (Ctrl-Shift-Alt E), then re-run the Nvidia filter, choosing Normalize Only. This prevents rendering problems with your specular, which may freak out when it is given un-normalized pixels. It can cause artifacts in-game, depending on whether the shader renormalizes or not.

Thanks for the help Eric. I'll add this to the tutorial

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http://www.andrei313.com

hi andrei313, nice tut.

I would like to know what happens when u have a fairly complex model but with lots of "hard edges" and u want to bake a normal map.
Lets say I have both models high and low, and the low is all in smoothing group 1, when I render the NMap it has all these gradients that come from the lowpoly model being all in the same smoothing group and having hard edges. how can we fix that? Damn inorganic models are a pain in the butt to bake.

cheers and thanks!

Not sure what's happening there. Can you post the normal map?

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http://www.andrei313.com

lol good job i didnt go through making mine i wasnt aware there was a tut on this
nice tut dude

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Portfolio

First of all thanks andrei! I'm a complete newb so I hope you don't mind this question, during step 2 after making the connects of 2 segments, how do I bring them closer to the margin? I tried scaling them however that didnt work.

There are a lot of ways but since you're just starting I suggest adding one loop at a time and moving it to the edge with the move tool.
You can also make 2 at a time and use the scale tool... and if you want to do it even quicker use the new connect feature that is in max since v8, I think.

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http://www.andrei313.com

Thanks again andrei, I was able to get through the whole tutorial and learned quite a bit! =)