WIP DeusExHr Cryo Container

[Mr-Brett]

I'll second Xnormal, it does mean exporting and the extra steps there but in general takes away a lot of the hassle of normal maps.

Regarding those slightly curved lines, it probably is the cage but in situations like that you can try turning an edge (not sure if that's the term in Maya) it probably won't fix it but might make it less bad...

[Kimahiri]

Thank you guys for your answers. I'm still trying to get good normals... I really have lost the count of how many tries\tweaks I made...
@Imsumdave
Yes I tried to edit the cage (in maya is called envelope) but the only thing that changed is what is calculated inside the normal, so in the end it doesn't even need to be that accurate... or at least this is what I noticed.

I tried xnormal too, but while it gives you a much cleaner normal, all the errors are still there (except for the one shown in the 2nd picture).
I even tried to create a new mesh, but while it solved the problem in picture 1, the other 2 were still there.

@Mr-Brett
For the curved lines I tried to add geometry, but it didn't work at all... Instead, when I made a much simple mesh, those lines came out very clean, but the other problems were still there.

[ImsumDave]

Now that I look at your UV layout I think I might have spotted the issue.
Break these pieces off from the main piece, make them their own UV island, and remap them.

The pieces on the top and bottom don't matter as much.

[Kimahiri]

Originally Posted by ImsumDave

Now that I look at your UV layout I think I might have spotted the issue.
Break these pieces off from the main piece, make them their own UV island, and remap them.
The pieces on the top and bottom don't matter as much.

Thanks man! This was actually one of the solutions I found but I wasn't that sure until I read your message. I separated the "border" sides, as you can see from this snapshot, and made all the border edges normal "hard", while all the other "soft":



It fixed the "weird reflections", but now I get a little seam all along the border that you can see here:



I really don't understand why it is there, since those are hard edges baked baked with the match method "geometry normals" (surface normals make the surface dull and way too plain...)

[ImsumDave]

This is where my knowledge starts to get spotty. I make weapons for skyrim and, in my experience, my normal maps tend to look much better in-game than in 3ds max. In fact, my normal maps usually look completely screwed in 3ds max. I haven't looked into the issue because everything usually turns out fine in Skyrim and Mudbox. Someone else will have to answer this one.

EDIT: an example

[Kimahiri]

Originally Posted by ImsumDave

This is where my knowledge starts to get spotty. I make weapons for skyrim and, in my experience, my normal maps tend to look much better in-game than in 3ds max. In fact, my normal maps usually look completely screwed in 3ds max. I haven't looked into the issue because everything usually turns out fine in Skyrim and Mudbox. Someone else will have to answer this one.

EDIT: an example
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/7...shittiness.png

Yes, since I've read somewhere else too that those seams are kind of depending on the rendering engine, I'm going to ignore them at the moment.

However, apparently the problem of the "warping normal" was the lower portion of the mesh's topology. I can't really explain yet what the exact problem was, but I found it out adding again those cavity to the "working" mesh doing a bake now and then during the process.
Here is a picture of the wireframe:


That seam is actually unnoticeable without zooming that much, so I'll ignore it at the moment.
Summing up, in case other Maya users will ever encounter the same issues as I had:
- Warping normals have been solved changing the topology of the model;
- Pointy triangles "carved" into the normal, have been fixed by using hard edges along one of the edges of that triangle;
- The stretched normals along the corners have been fixed by relaxing more the UVs in that region (in my case I made a UV island for all those borders);
- The bright spots in the marmoset render have been fixed by triangulating the mesh before exporting it.

Thanks everybody for the help!

[bb0x]

Yeah, its like I said over at polycount. The issue was the triangulation of the 2 quads in the middle. If you have an irregularly shaped quad, the effect of the triangulation can be unpredictable, like in your case. This can/will happen with very long quads as well.

[Kimahiri]

Originally Posted by bb0x

Yeah, its like I said over at polycount. The issue was the triangulation of the 2 quads in the middle. If you have an irregularly shaped quad, the effect of the triangulation can be unpredictable, like in your case. This can/will happen with very long quads as well.

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind ^__^