[Turambar]

looks like ****ty compression or something

[Scooby_Doo]

Checking....
It looks like the panel line isn't as deep but still jaggity.

It's PSD so there shouldn't be any lossless compression.  Also should the cube sides have seperate uv map sections instead of sharing?

[bkd86]

Scooby, what program are you using?
I ran this through one I have and got this in like 10 sec with no touch up.
You won't get good detail on your test without some specular and better lighting. Displacement maps do better shadowing than normal maps since its actual geometry. Normal ma[s only will shadow in the grooves not the bumps casting shadows. If your using the Nvidia pluggin I can't help you much, but the ATI program works pretty well, but you need to use a black and white image. Post a image of the texture you want to make into a normal map and I'll whip you one up real quick.

[Scooby_Doo]

Ok heres the base texture:

heres the height map:

heres nvidias tool normal map (height generation: 3x3, height source: average rgb, alpha field: unchanged, minz:0 scale: 2):

and heres Max 7's Mental Ray result with shine and lighting:


Not very pretty....

[Taristin]

I looked to give it a try, but my video card on this laptop doesnt support pixel shaders

[Scooby_Doo]

Neither does mine, and I don't have a laptop 

Weeee  my 1,000 post LOL

[DaBrain]

@Scooby_Doo

One problem seems to be, that the cube doesn't have enough polygons. At least it looks that way.

[Scooby_Doo]

It's a basic 12tria cube... Isn't that the purpose of normal mapping?

[Flipside]

It almost looks as if the UV map is rotated by a minute amount, since the bump always drifts in one direction.

What's really strange is that if you look at the far side of the cube, you can see the polygons along the inside 'wall' of the bumps on those polygons, as though the bumps had been modelled rather than textured, since if the bumps were being rendered to the texture, you would not see that.

[Scooby_Doo]

Hmmm good point, unless mental ray can figure out based on the normals.

[Bobboau]

try bluring the bump map just a tiny amount before converting it to a normal map.

[Scooby_Doo]

I blurred it... and watched it as it rendered from the old to the new blurred. didn't notice a thing...

However when i zoomed out a bit. this happened



And with bumpmap :-)

[Flipside]

Yeah, that's the problem, the displacement map was displacing the polygons off of the edge of the cube, hence the 'flying edges' effect. That also explains why it was converting bumps into polygons.

[Scooby_Doo]

How do I fix that?  Could that be the reason I'm having jagged lines?

[Flipside]

You don't need to, 3Ds max uses Bumpmaps, normal maps are a sort of 'cheap' version that are faster, but don't self-shadow. I forgot that 'displacement' maps in 3DS max divide the object up into thousands of polygons and offsets their position according to brightness, which is slightly different to a bumpmap. That was why your first model looked so odd, it was converting the normal map to greyscale and then displacing the polygons according to the result.

I don't know if 3DSMax has a way of rendering bumps from normal maps, alas, since I don't use it, but I'm sure someone will tell you if there is

Basically, if the Bump-map works, then so should the normal map.

[Nuke]

i know max 8, in d3d mode, you can select dx9 shaders for your material. just click where it says standard and pick shader from the list, then load the shader for normal mapping.

[Scooby_Doo]

Ohhh I think i remember seeing something about DirectX Shaders in Max 7... I'll report back in a few :-)


Nope no go.... Standard renderer does nothing and mental ray gives a warning about being not supported by this translator and renders to black.  Besides this is above my head.

[Nuke]

i just use the ts7 player myself, it works pretty well i just need a way to turn off the ****ing grid 
it screws up the lighting.

or if youre really desprate get a copy of doom 3 or quake 4 and replace some commonly used texture and normal map for one of your design. i find that works just as well. just remember pk4s are zips with a different extension

[gevatter Lars]

Scooby are you using max 6 or 7? Could you send me the max files with the textures...I would like to take a look at it...when I got the time to do it.

[Scooby_Doo]

Uploaded to the ftp, base.rar