I'm trying to get good normal maps for panel bevels on my Corolla Sprinter mod, but having issues. Issues which are not helped by the game/torque issues making trial and error such a lengthy process (shut down beamng, delete cache, restart, rinse, repeat, get random nonsensical errors) :/ Everything I get is quite aliased and chunky despite a high res map. I've looked at others work, such as Gabe's vehicles and Mythbuster's Caddy, and they both have much smoother looking normal maps than I am getting. (just check out the door seam and pillar, don't mind all the other glitchy stuff, I havent removed the unwanted bevels at this point) I am trying to follow the method Gabe described in his devblog on vehicle workflow. I have 3dsmax, Pshop CS5, w the Nvidia DDS/normal map filter plugin. To start, I have baked a plain white diffuse map using scanline renderer at 4096px (i plan to use a 2048 texture) as a .tga 8 bit rgb w alpha. I brought that into PS, duplicated the layer twice, contracted one selection and expanded the other by 1px as described. Using normal map filter, I convert each layer separately from height to normal map. I've tried a myriad of settings. I go from this: To this: To this: You can see already some weird stair-stepping/aliasing problems After doing this to all 3 layers, I set their layers to overlay. I resize to 2048 and export as a .png to test on the car. It looks like crap, though the general directions of the normals seem OK, they aren't inverted or anything. Variations I've tried: Converting to 16 bit before the normal conversion Tried different resize sampling options Testing on the car at 4096px rather than resizing 8192 pixel diffuse map, which crashed the plugin Applying gaussian blurs before and/or after normal conversion Anybody know where I'm going wrong? I want to finish and release this damn thing, but I want it to look the part!!
I believe the solution is to *not* convert each layer to normal map separately. You need to merge the three layers into one, so you get a 3-pixel gradient from white to black, and then convert the result to normal map. EDIT: Just went back through gabester's vehicle workflow thread and remembered he also recommends baking at double resolution to eliminate the aliasing. That may fix the problem by itself.
Yup I am baking at 2x resolution, and he does say to run each layer individually and then combine, though your method makes more intuitive sense to me. I just tried resized my 4096 baked diffuse to 2048 BEFORE the normal conversion rather than after, and that so far in these latest few minutes looks a bit more promising, though the bevels are too fat. Perhaps if I go up 4x for my bake and resize before the normal filter... - - - Updated - - - Normal maps achieved! I got much better results resizing from 8192px to 2048 after merging the layers and before the normal map conversion. The effect was like blur but smarter, anti-aliasing effect without making the line fat and fuzzy. Also, erasing the bevel on one side of the seam is helpful, I guess there are some padding/overlapping issues.
