2001 - 2008 RM 250 (WIP)

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

In fact, I'm having real issues with shading.. Everyone who's seen the model says it looks great but it has shading issues on the tank and the shrouds, look fine in high poly but when baking those shading issues are exaggerated big time. I've tried all settings in blender, xnormal, manually touching up the normal map, nothing seems to fix.

Anyone got any suggestions?

[pacopastor34]

In fact, I'm having real issues with shading.. Everyone who's seen the model says it looks great but it has shading issues on the tank and the shrouds, look fine in high poly but when baking those shading issues are exaggerated big time. I've tried all settings in blender, xnormal, manually touching up the normal map, nothing seems to fix.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Did you used an alpha map in the livery_n with the specular map?

[Snappe]

it has shading issues on the tank and the shrouds

Can you post a screenshot?

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Sure.. In Blender with normals,



In game with same normals..



And lastly, the horrible in Blender with no normals..



Screenshot at the top here was taken with no normals, but it was taken in a custom menu environment with full on lighting..

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

... So... How about them screenshots

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Nope, well, the normal I'm bringing into mxb using an shd file and have no problems doing that..

My normal also has spec in the alpha, the same as I would do for track textures.

As far as I can tell blender bakes normal artifacts to compensate for the low polys bad shading. Subsequently in blender my model looks great.

In mxb however, all that compensated shading really stands out.

I've also tried flipping the red, green, and both in the normal colour channels.

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Latest progress and it's looking better.. Realised using 'auto smooth' you can set the angle. So I found the angle of 37 to work well for all plastics (roughly) and did a new bake. Then set the angle in FBX2EDF to 37 and it definitely looks like this is what I was missing.

I'd tried setting the angle before but was using default Blender angle (90, or 180 can't remember) and had no luck setting this angle in FBX2EDF. Maybe my normal just had too much work to do compensating for the bad shading.

So this is with normal map, spec map and reflection map. Not perfect but much much better. 

[StoneRider]

[pacopastor34]

I get holidays today, 2 weeks free, please finish it!!!! I want to skin that beauty!!!! Nice work as always champion!!

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

I'd love to.. But!

I either figure out a way of importing it without all these shading errors, or I completely remake all the plastics.

Number 1 I'm not sure is possible, number 2 is going to take some real time, although I could always refer back to my high poly plastics to see if I could reduce them more sensibly..

[m121c]

There a few factors that can result in weird shading errors.

1. Base poly flow (both on the low poly model + highpoly model). If the polyflow is odd it will provide weird results all around. A clean and flowing mesh will provide good bakes and unwrapping, so if its off it can cause a huge headache.

2. When you bake to a low poly model, you want to ensure the low poly is already triangulated. Sometimes if you bake it to a quadrified mesh, and you import it into a game engine, the game will auto triangulate the model. Now it could retriangulate it differently then what you baked it too (although it displays a quad, 3D programs still form meshes in triangles even you can't see it). Now, normals are specific to a mesh face, so if the triangles are different it can look weird.

3. The bake cage. Not sure how blender works, but in 3DS Max you have a cage that contains your 2 meshes. (Low poly + High poly) The cage is like the "out of bounds" for the baking rays. It's tough to describe, but basically the tighter the cage is around the models the more accurate the bake. If part of the mesh passes through it, it will just not have normal information there which is no good. So you gotta find that happy medium of getting it as close as possible but not to close. In max you can manually adjust this cage.

4. So if the model is good, no probs, and the bake is setup correctly then it could be channels. Oh snd another thing, you cant not rotate a baked normal map. Thats a no no as well.

Normal maps are awesome, they can do amazing things. Take it from aguy who baked every single part on his bike, man its a headache if something is not looking right.

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Thanks for the tips!

Poly flow is good on the whole, but a few areas that are giving me problems are now being adjusted. Fingers crossed I'll get away with not having to adjust the high poly but if I have to then so be it

No Blender doesn't use cages in default mode, I think you can use them in cycles render but I haven't got that far yet. I read up on it and although I can't put it into words I know why.. roughly lol..

I did try xNormal which uses cages but ended up with the same weird shading. My take on this is that I did the cage right, but my low poly plastics are just not good enough. Bit of a delay on things but shouldn't hold it up too much.

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

It definitely required a quick tutorial lol..

Did it without a cage and got the same result as xNormal with a cage so didn't bother, xNormal is so easy compared!

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

New low poly shroud, now I'm tired and need to sleep a little bit 

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Bring it on Blender low poly shading errors