[Scooby_Doo]

Wait? Stacking (with a slight shift) uvmap space works?

[Water]

Wait? Stacking (with a slight shift) uvmap space works?

With a proper normal map stacking works without any shifting.

[Scooby_Doo]

Please explain, even with symmety?

[Col. Fishguts]

In my experience the trick is stacking without welding in the UV editor, the slight sub-pixel shifting should not be necessary. But to confirm we'd need a coder in here to clarify how PCS2 handles welded/unwelded UV verts when converting to POF, because I'm actually not sure what happens with that information. I only know that it makes a difference.

[Nuke]

ah, crtl+b

i think the general idea is you dont want your seam verts to share a normal. you want each one to have its own normal. of course ive only ever made one normal map and it was a pita, and it didnt even have any seams. so i really dont know how to approach the mirrored geometry meshes that i need to normal map. if i were to make a new model from scratch, id probibly avoid seams like the plague, and even do non-layered uv maps on the smaller meshs.

[Scooby_Doo]

Oh I think I've tried that.. no luck.  Best advice is just use seperate uv space for both sides right?

[Water]

I my experience the trick is stacking without welding in the UV editor, the slight sub-pixel shifting should not be necessary. But to confirm we'd need a coder in here to clarify how PCS2 handles welded/unwelded UV verts when converting to POF, because I'm actually not sure what happens with that information. I only know that it makes a difference.

I'd have expected it to work better with a separate mesh on each side (mirrored) It seems that FS prefers a continuous mesh. Though If the mesh is flat  it's not so important

Both Photoshop and baked maps behave the same.

[Droid803]

I don't know why but, without touching the normal map:
perfect stacking (nothing welded) results in the funky lighting bar.
Sub pixel-shifted imperfect stacking results in proper lighting (no seam even? maybe because its flat), just a smooth flat surface which catches light as if it weren't mirrored at all and is all a single UV island...

[pecenipicek]

okay, after playing with this for a few hours now, i'm getting very inconsistent results with the seams. i cannot confirm the "magic" solution works, but neither can i deny it.

BUT. The original models both have problems of the UV's being right at the edge of their alloted texture space. you usually leave 2-5 pixels of fiddle room outward from where your UV rests, regardless of the mirroredness of it. moving them inward does not fix it that much, but reduces the visible effect noticeably.


which brings me to the other point. READ THIS!

The whole page is a gloriously excellent read of many many tips and tricks.

[Nuke]

has anyone tried putting both sides of the seam in different smoothgroups? i think i read somewhere that the pof format splits up polygroups based on smoothing boundries, but im not sure if that would make things worse or not. like ive said ive never actually had to deal with a seam so idk.

Oh I think I've tried that.. no luck.  Best advice is just use seperate uv space for both sides right?

thats the surefire way. the thread is full of ways to get around the issue though.

I don't know why but, without touching the normal map:
perfect stacking (nothing welded) results in the funky lighting bar.
Sub pixel-shifted imperfect stacking results in proper lighting (no seam even? maybe because its flat), just a smooth flat surface which catches light as if it weren't mirrored at all and is all a single UV island...

i never weld, i just grab a bunch of verts and scale them down until they are all in the same general location. floating point wonkyness will make sure they are never all in exactly the same place.

[Droid803]

i never weld, i just grab a bunch of verts and scale them down until they are all in the same general location. floating point wonkyness will make sure they are never all in exactly the same place.

Without welding results in something like sub-pixel shifts (which is what I noticed when I tried re-mapping parts; that I couldn't get them perfectly stacked no matter what). Which is why I decided to just nudge the perfectly stacked islands a bit to save time so I didn't need to do all the re-scaling. By welding and de-welding it results in perfect stacking, which causes the weird mirrored lighting fault thing. I guess this is why UVmapping after mirroring results in no issues so as long as you don't weld everything together to create perfect stacking again.