Hi,
Please see the attached screenshot of a sphere rendered in carrara with simple test of a normal map, there is shading marks that should not be there and some that is supposed to be there is missing? The sphere was properly UV mapped with Deep UV. Can anyone please tell me what has happend? :o
You’ll probably need to flip the map vertically. But Carrara doesn’t natively support normal maps. You need the Baker plugin from http://www.inagoni.com/news.php which will give you the best results. If you’re already using this then flipping the map should do it.
hi,
Yes I have the plugin, flipping the map in carrara did not help? 
Then I don’t know quite what to suggest. It may be that Carrara is screwing the UVs, though I’ve not had problems with UVs generated by ZBrush. Take a look in Carrara’s UV editor. Why did you use Deep UV?
Or it may be that the colors are muddled. I’ve not used Baker since Julien updated it to handle ZB normal maps but the ZB normal map settings I used before for Carrara were: Normal Map Flip Z & Flip Vert. Importing a ZBrush obj file into Carrara you may need to switch YZ and flip Z.
If you post the (zipped) files here I’ll take a look later.
Thanks here is the file 
OK, I’ve had a look at this. I think you need to use different settings when outputting your normal map from ZBrush. I tried the default settings with the Baker ‘ZBrush’ shader and I don’t like the results. I got better results using my old method:
In Preferences, Import/Export: set Normal Map Flip Z & Normal Map Flip Vert to ON, all other normal map settings OFF. Then output your normal map.
In Carrara, use the Baker ‘Classic’ version as shown in my pic. There should be no need to flip the map as you’ve already done that in ZB. Below is the normal map I produced for your sphere and a pic showing the Carrara render. With two lights you can get jaggies down the mapping seam. Switch on smoothing in the Vertex Modeler to reduce this.
Hi Marcus I tried your settings with no better results-could my install be corrupt? I have attached a series of screen shots to show my steps with a head I made in another program. Are my normal map settings correct? :o 
If you don’t turn on SmoothUV, then the UV maps of your base mesh get torn apart for the high res mesh. This will cause certain areas which are mapped to have the UV’s torn off them, and also cause the UV maps to on other areas to slide around on your model. At least this is the best description I can give. I have seen results similar to these on displacement maps that did not have SmoothUV turned on.
No harm in using SmoothUV but I don’t think that’s the problem here. I think it’s the Import/Export settings. If you try this with the sphere you posted then at least we’ll be playing the same ball game :). Set up ZB as my settings, import your sphere, and generate the normal map. Use the default Carrara settings as shown and the Baker ‘Classic’ set up.
[EDIT: Don’t re-export the sphere when testing this, just the normal map.
