Hi,
When creating a normal map zbrush inverts/flips the orientation of every uvw segment. On the object in zbrush you can see in the normalmap a seam where two uvw segments join because in one segment the colors are normal and in the next segment they are flipped.
When rendering the normalmap in 3dsmax7 this creates seams and wrong rendering results.
For example a mountain would suddenly turn into a valley in the adjoining uvwsegment.
Is this a bug in zbrush2 ?
Thanks,
Steve Weber
I seem to be having this same exact problem.
In ATI’s normal map viewer the normals seem fine, but in max, both realtime and rendered, the light seems flipped on sections. if i generate the normals in max based off of a cage projection method it works fine.
ZBrush has some issues i think with how they generate their normals… it may not be a bug but its definitely different than how MAX is used to viewing them.
Any input from the Pixo crew would help alot.
yes, i think that we ,users of max are having great trouble with normal maps, ive been strugling loog and tweaking a lot to get a good normal map out of z brush but its just impossible. I have searched here and over the internet and no succes, maybe we could get some tecnical info about this out of the experts here on this forum?
would be nice
well i deal with discreet [autodesk now] an awful lot and i asked the guy i deal with what the deal was. because if you take this normal map and use it in any realtime normal map software like crytek or ati normal map viewer it looks fine or at least mine did. but in max they dont. what i found from talking to him is if its an object that moves in the world but doesnt get deformed you can use non-tangent in zbrush and load it up as an xyz in max. it worked but for some reason i got a really choppy faceted looking normal map.
still not a great solution. fact is max’s viewport is one of the best realtime directx viewers out there with the ability to use more than one light at a time [beats maya] and its really fast on the quadro 4400s.
pixologic needs to get up and work on this or at least inform us how he does this calculation. discreet has no friggin idea either.
I’m not a Max user so I can’t suggest a solution but you might like to check a couple of things. There a chapter in the ZB2 Practical Guide that deals with Max and normal maps which might help. And there are various export options for normal maps and your obj which affect how the normal map is output from ZB. Look under Preferences>ImportExport.
thanks man , but i have tryed the practical manual. The thing is that there they use max 5 , and then it didnt had the ability to read normal maps, so it uses nvidia´s dds photoshop plugin and the polybump previewer.Now on max 7 we have normal bump, which allows max to read the normal map. So the proces s completly different, plus, the problem is the way the tangent map is read or generated (because even in z brush view port sometimes y get those awful seams), and i have tryed the settings on the export options. Im completely clueless about this thing believeme, and im not the only one, you just have to check the forums to see that and is a shame that nobody form pixologic says a thing about the topic
its zbrushes problem hands down. they generate the normal maps incorrectly. if you lay your object out on the UVW all facing the correct way they will sometiems work but if you rotate a part upside down you will see the normal map lights are still casted the same way… when it should know the orientation of the mesh, it does not.
i use max7 to generate the normal maps and use photoshop to clean the ugly seams up a tad. works way better than zbrushes method.