Desert Eagle

[glynnsmith]

Have you tried inverting the red or green channel of your normal map?

I know the normal maps baked from Max have to have on of those channels inverted for it to look right in UE3.

*edit* also, the base colour for the normal map in UE3 looks like a pure blue hue, where it should be a half blue-purple. I don't know if something's messed up or if it's just your colour settings for the screengrab.

[Tiros]

Ah, now that Glynn mentions it, the colour, have you used correct compression settings?

[Paperclip]

I think it has something to do with smoothed and unsmoothed tangents.

more info: Normalmaps for the Technical Game Modeler

It could be an inverted colour channel though.

[Ghostscape]

Originally Posted by dangermouse

My brain is officially exploding .

I made a hi res, just did one part. Got it looking su-weet.

It took an entire day of testing and tweaking, but I got a normal map baked out that just looks SO nice in Maya.

Exported my mesh, imported it into UE3, and like an excited little school boy started assembling my material.

Attached ire screen grabs from both Maya and UE3.

*sigh*

This is a breakdown of the bake settings from Maya in case I've cocked something up there:
File format: Targa
Map space: Tangent Space
Search Method: closest to envelope

I've used smooth edge normals on all of my geometry.

Any ideas? Been stuck here for hours. I'm SO close!!!

Incidentally in case it was a geometry problem i tried flattening out all the fins to a single poly, and in Maya it still looked good, but in UE3, it looked more like a light grayscale diffuse map.... If you still think my geometry might be to blame I'll recreate that test and post screens of that....

Looks like you changed your low poly mesh after baking. I'm going to guess you probably baked your normals, then set everything to smoothing group 1 (which you probably shouldn't do for hard-edged models like this, that's best for organics, you can typically get stronger normal maps with multiple smoothing groups and intelligent UV breaks).

Once you bake you cannot alter your low-poly geo without re-baking, because if you change a vert normal it will throw off the tangentspace, making the tangent-space normal map incorrect.

[fabiodan]

It happens because UE3 compresses textures on import, so your normal map is different the moment you get it in.

First read the " unsmoothed " part of this article, where it explains how to use unsmoothed geometry to have a normal map work on it.

Then split the smoothing groups where i indicated (in the low poly) , apply the UV trick (if you dont wanna do it at first the surfaces will not suck but the seams will show) and render the normals again. try on maya and put it on UE and it'll look ok in the very least...

[fabiodan]

Originally Posted by Paperclip

more info: Normalmaps for the Technical Game Modeler

AAAh he beat me to it

[benlucas]

You can try to generate a local space normal map instead of this tangent space one

[Perfect_Storm]

I see a lot of things that can be optimized. I made a quick sketch on what you can do for example. Try to balance the amount of detail a bit more. For example you use 18 or more sided cylinders for a very tiny detail. Thats a bit over the top. You can use the detail for better places. Here's the pic. Red line means remove this edge. Green line means add this edge. Purple arrow (Yes, thats an arrow ) means weld these row of vertices to the vertex it points at.