Thanks, I got it to work now.
I hid the left bar then pressed Tab to hide the rest. Then when I ran Zmapper the control panel showed.
Now to play with it 
Iām running winXP with SP2 installed. 1GB RAM, 3ghz AMD64, with 28.7GB free space on the ZB drive. Iām using 3ds Max 8 for rendering,
Now, my problem. Everything about Zmapper works just fine, except that the normal maps it makes has blocky areas on it. Thereās no seams in the uvās in (most) of the areas the blockiness occurs, and no obvious reason for it to be there as far as I know. It does show the seams pretty badly as well.
Hereās the normal maps it produces;
You can see that not all the blockiness is at the seams, some along the biceps area, and a lot around the bottom of the pecs.
Any help with this would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.
Hey there, ReplicA ā You should increase the Scan Distance and try again.
Thanks for the reply, Aurick, but itās still giving me blocky results. I increased the scan distance by 2 extra blocks twice (total of 4 extra blocks increased), and I get the exact same results. At first I thought this might be a modeling issue, where the normals were at too extreme an angle to get a proper looking normal map, but Iāve had more extreme angles on other models before, and the normals turned out fine. Iāll try increasing it some more, and post if I get the problem fixed.
Anyone have any other ideas?
Hi ReplicA, The thing that occured to me when I saw your UV layout was that the places where you see the seams may be where the UVs are stretching only a few of the textures pixels over the area of the poly. Could that be true?
What is the density of pixels contained by the UVs of the polys bordering the seams? If there are only a few pixels in this region, the map may not be able to store enough values to yield a perfect result.
Does your texture have seams too?
Thanks, Antimorph. Iāll say this now, Iām no texture āgeekā so most of what you just said was way over my head,:o but I guess the gist of it was that my uvās might be to blame?
I donāt have any texture for this guy, so I canāt say if this happens with the texture or not. Heās not even close to done, I just wanted to get used to ZMapper before I had to have this guy turned in.
I think the reason for that spike that goes through everything, is that one corner of that uv chunk is half a pixel too far down on the uv space, so ZB sees it as coming out of the top, instead of just past the bottom.
Anyway, I should be able to re-do the uvās, and import him back into ZB without losing my work, right? I tried that before, and it didnāt work. Well, Iāll try again, and see what happens. Thanks for the help. 
The more I look at the UV map, the more convinced I am itās a UV issue. Why not use UV Tiles combined with projection master and ZAppLink?
repeating the question, now in the right place
I have a doubt. I made the test using the Elephant and following the 8 steps of the mini-tutorial, however, the item 6 (Modify any settings, if necessary) didnāt make any difference in render (8 - preview). I modified all the configurations, and the render was always the same, the same amount of details, nothing changed. Is that normal? Am I making something wrong?
I would, but I have to hand this over to a texture artist, whom I donāt know, and I donāt want to make their job harder. Especially if they donāt have ZB. This is for a mod, so Iām just doing the modeling, uvās, and normal maps.
That spike was caused by what I thought it was. I went ahead and changed the uvās a bit, and that spike went away. Iām still seeing the seams, though.
I was also able to solve the blockiness around his pecs by editing the triangulation of the polyās there. Now the normal map looks perfect there. Yeah, apparently at least MOST of the blockiness can be solved by editing the polyās triangulation.
Now if we can just sort out those seams, weāll be in business!
Hi Guys Iām itching to use this plugin but I canāt just yet:
I carry out the basic instructions i.e. load a model and go to SubDiv lev 1 - blank alpha and blank texture. When I press the Zmapper button I get the following (grab below) clicking on the first dialog gives the second : The only way to out is to keep pressing exit and I get back to Zbrush but cannot use Zmapper at all
Using:
Windows XP Home SP2
Pentium 4 2.8, I gig ram, Nvidia 64Meg card
20 gig free hard disk space.
Help please
Thankyou
Billy
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vandersousa- That is normal. The values you have changed are not intended to change the result of the preview render. That render is for comparison purposes. When youāre using ZMapper successfully you can compare your result with that preview render and impress anyone who cares that youāve turned 2 million polys into 20000 or so with very acceptable results.
Replica - I am having the smae issue with the seams. The problem is in the UVWās. You, as am I , are using tangent space normal maps. When looked on the character as a color map, there is no issue as the seams do not exist across the UV space. But what the problem is is your elements in your UVW are rotated in UV space. Example, your torsoās up is positive Y in the UV space and in the world, but it looks like you rotated your arms and your hands in the UV space. This looks fine as a color map, but the way tangent normals are used this creates seams. I am still trying to find a way to resolve this without having to re-uvw my mesh. Did that make anysense?
I donāt know about that, Iāve been making normal maps for some time now, and the direction of the uvās has never played a part in any seam strangeness. Until now, Iāve been using Max 8 to make my normal maps, and Iāve never had trouble with uv seams, no matter how ugly, or weird my uvās were.
Iām sure thereās just a setting Iām missing, or something thatās going unnoticed, either in ZB or Max. hopefully, itāll get worked out soon, so I can turn this guy in when heās done.
This is an awsome tool guys! Does anyone have a stting for Unreal3 out there?
Also, are there any plans to incorporate the cavity map/ambient occlusion into the projection rendering?
yay for zmapper
boo for not getting it to work!
alright. Iāve tried generating normal maps before, and NEVER have it worked, either generated from max or zbrush. I never did figure out why it wasnt working, and I was hoping zmapper would work. Now, mind you, the normal map generated looks great with all the details, but it is when I bring it into max that it gets weird.
Iād greatly appreciate any help!
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Did you try loading the Max 7 preset for ZMapper, Dty5731? ZB makes normal maps with a green channel that Max needs flipped in order to render right. The Max 7 preset for ZMapper does this automaticaly. Also, sometimes the polyās triangulation needs to be changed in Max for the normal map to render correctly.
If youāve already tried that, then I guess your in the same boat I am. Iām getting blockiness, and weird seam behaviour. And if thatās the case with you, sorry, I canāt help you as Iām trying to get the answer myself
I think I got it
Load up the max 7 preset and THEN
In the expert pass 1 mode turn on derive normal from tanget x binormal
This will fix the seams in the tangent maps
/me does a dance
This will create seams in the color of the normals, but compensates for the rotation of the UVWās in the unwraps
EDIT: I spoke too soon. There still seems to be some seem issues, but it does help some. I am on the right track.
Object Space works just fine, so it is just a tangent issueā¦
Iām gettin , I think, inverted colors on my Normal Map. I simply ran with the default setting by the instructions. ans by the pictures I posted you can see the colors Iām getting.
So first question? Am I just missing something way to obvious?
Iām running on a PC. Iām on XP Pro Version 2002, and Rendering in Max 8.
Machine specs: CPU is a pentium 4 3 ghz, wit 2 gB of RAM, a gforce 6800 card, and 74 gig of free disk space.
Thanks For any help you can provide.
Brad Garneau
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There is some discussion of this same problem in this thread
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-87991.html
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EricChadwick
10-06-2004, 06:30 AM
Flipped UVs have to be fixed by the game exporter and game engine. There is some easily-available code that helps solve this, on the NVIDIA developer site, called NVMeshMender (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/NVMeshMender.html).
Until this is implemented in the game engine, you will have shading seams. Youāll even have seams on non-mirrored UVs. For example, consider the UVs of a bipedal character, where the arm UVs are cut off at the shoulder, and the arm UVs are laid out vertically. Usually the chest UVs would also be vertical. But this causes a normal-mapping seam between the arm and chest, since the upper edge of the arm UV is horizontal, while the shoulder edge of the chest UV is vertical. This is without any mirroring. Because these two edges are at different angles, the normal map on either side of this seam will get different colors, signifying different directions for their normals, thus youāll get a shading seam.
However, once your game engine uses the right kind of code to correct these differences, the seam should disappear (assuming there wasnāt a seam in the high-res model, and assuming youāre properly padding the edge texels).
The code basically duplicates vertices along the UV edges and massages their normals, which rotates the texel normals to match one another when the surfaces are rendered in-game.
(wow, I really need to update this thread)ā
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