hi.
im having a problem. i created a mesh in zbrush with 6 sub division levels. i select the lowest level and create a normal map. after flipping the green i got it to look ok (kind of). there are still lines between each quad. it is not a perfect representation of the high poly mesh. im not sure if im doing something wrong. i am displaying it in maya. i have also tried to create the normal map with xnormal. it looked the same in maya as the zbrush generated normal. still a little pixelated.
any suggestions?
Some pics of your UVs, maps, and result would probably help break this down.
The settings you’re using in both xNormal and Zbrush would also be nice.
UV orig 12mb - http://www.mediafire.com/view/ndnrzc5ttx99bd9/uv(2).bmp
resulting Normal orig 12mb - http://www.mediafire.com/view/5v05bo73dwlr83y/face_normal_vert.bmp
screen shot of maya before applying the normal - http://www.mediafire.com/view/p1tlfdq9vq6348b/no-normal.jpg
screen of maya with normal applied - http://www.mediafire.com/view/a13ji4uy93k7zn0/result-01.jpg
screen of maya showing odd result at neck area - http://www.mediafire.com/view/vuug7zyras9fphq/result-02.jpg
screen of mesh in zbrush 2mil active - http://www.mediafire.com/view/o3jfw9ax64inf37/zbrush-screen.jpg
.bmp){kind=link}
settings:
zbrush - best result: tangent, adaptive, smoothUV, and FlipG all on
tried adaptive, smoothUV, and flipG off in every combination.
xnormal - size 1024, edge padding 16, bucket 32, x+ y- z+, tangent on
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You need to smooth your mesh. You can do this in maya inside the normals menu, inside xNormal in the smoothing section of your lowpoly mesh. Zbrush shouldn’t have had any problems actually, but if you applied that map to your unsmoothed mesh you’d get errors. You shouldn’t be flipping your green channel for Maya by the way.
thanks for your reply.
i realized, i have no clue what im doing…
the smooth option in maya was under the mesh menu instead of normal drop down. after smoothing the mesh it doubled the size of the file. now there are twice as many active points which is what i was trying to avoid. i also noticed that after turning on “use all lights” in maya preview, the texture appeared on the wrong side of the mesh. maybe this is part of the problem?
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Polygon Menu Dropdown (or hold spacebar)>normals>soften edge
You probably need to unlock your normals as well.
To check your normal direction you can do a few things.
ctrl+A to access your attribute editor>select your xxxShape>mesh component display>backface culling>full or wire
You can also check your normal direction in the viewport by turning on Display>Polygons>Face Normals
you were right about “soften edges”. thank you so much!
as for the direction of the normal map, if the green lines are supposed to come out of the textured side then i have it the right way. if not then i need to flip it but it looks like the normal direction is backward. im confused again…
p.s. thanks for all the help!
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Your green lines are pointing the right way, but that won’t matter if your normals are locked. Which I believe they are. What happens when you turn off backface culling?
when i turn on backface culling, the black section remains unchanged and the texture which is on the inside disappears.
Yeah, unlock your normals, flip them and you should be good to go.