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trouble baking normals

dave hoeffgen

dave hoeffgen

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germany
when baking normals in Blender I usually do it from a heightmap and in most cases it does the job.
But then I realized that my glass windows (which were supposed to be perfectly flat) got a pattern of bumpiness only visible in the sim and not included in my source map. Using gimps auto selection tool with zero tolerance I saw the roughness in the bump map which shouldn't be there.

I'm still using v 2.69 as I didn't want to change the running system.
Does somebody have experience if newer versions are better doing this?
Is there a setting I missed?
Or do I have to manually correct the normal map?

Thanks in advance for any help
 
dave hoeffgen said:
when baking normals in Blender I usually do it from a heightmap and in most cases it does the job.
But then I realized that my glass windows (which were supposed to be perfectly flat) got a pattern of bumpiness only visible in the sim and not included in my source map. Using gimps auto selection tool with zero tolerance I saw the roughness in the bump map which shouldn't be there.

I'm still using v 2.69 as I didn't want to change the running system.
Does somebody have experience if newer versions are better doing this?
Is there a setting I missed?
Or do I have to manually correct the normal map?

Thanks in advance for any help
Click to expand...
Hello...

I still do the normal maps the old fashion way: by converting within a photo editor. But what I do with textures that have windows,.. I remove or mask the windows with a white color... then create the rest of the texture, by converting for normal maps. Hopefully this makes sense... and helps you.




Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk
 
Pyscen said:
Hello...

I still do the normal maps the old fashion way: by converting within a photo editor. But what I do with textures that have windows,.. I remove or mask the windows with a white color... then create the rest of the texture, by converting for normal maps. Hopefully this makes sense... and helps you.




Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply but in my case I bake a texture out of multiple ones so that would be quite some work to manually do a normal map.
I think I'll stick to repainting the baked one for now. What was the hex color of a perfectly straight pixel again ( non fs)?
 
Hello again,
Now I repainted the normal maps and converted them again using the MCX Texture Converter. The effect got less but didn't disappear completely. So I checked the dds and realized that MCX also adds dots of other colours.

Is there a program which does the conversion better?

Also the faces (quads) are visibly split into two triangles when the normal map is applied and the bump effect seems inverse between the two tris.
Is there a setting in the FS material I might have missed?
 
dave hoeffgen said:
Hello again,
Now I repainted the normal maps and converted them again using the MCX Texture Converter. The effect got less but didn't disappear completely. So I checked the dds and realized that MCX also adds dots of other colours.

Is there a program which does the conversion better?

Also the faces (quads) are visibly split into two triangles when the normal map is applied and the bump effect seems inverse between the two tris.
Is there a setting in the FS material I might have missed?
Click to expand...

Hi dave hoeffgen!

I have had an issue with working with normal maps using Gimp as well. And in this case it took me about a week to figure out the problem. I found that it was Gimp 2.8 that was causing me my issues. So I did some research on the internet reading posts of other peoples issues with using Gimp and FSX.

My conclusion was that I needed to bite the bullet and purchase Photoshop. So I purchased Photoshop Elements 14. Now Elements is a watered down version of the full version of Photoshop. The software does not allow you to use channels and some other functions; but the bonus was that I can now use the NVidia plug-in for making Normal maps and .dds files. And to counter the missing functions in Elements I use Gimp 2.8 for those issues.

Using the two software's together I have had excellent results.

Note: I purchased Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 14 for $170.00

I hope this helps.

Thanks, Kris
 
krispy1001 said:
Hi dave hoeffgen!

I have had an issue with working with normal maps using Gimp as well. And in this case it took me about a week to figure out the problem. I found that it was Gimp 2.8 that was causing me my issues. So I did some research on the internet reading posts of other peoples issues with using Gimp and FSX.

My conclusion was that I needed to bite the bullet and purchase Photoshop. So I purchased Photoshop Elements 14. Now Elements is a watered down version of the full version of Photoshop. The software does not allow you to use channels and some other functions; but the bonus was that I can now use the NVidia plug-in for making Normal maps and .dds files. And to counter the missing functions in Elements I use Gimp 2.8 for those issues.

Using the two software's together I have had excellent results.

Note: I purchased Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 14 for $170.00

I hope this helps.

Thanks, Kris
Click to expand...
Thanks for the hint :)

Sorry if this came along wrong but gimp was never the source of the problem. I just used it to check the quality and to repaint the normal maps which worked perfectly.
The next place where unwanted bumpiness came in was the MCX Texture converter.
 
dave hoeffgen said:
Thanks for the hint :)

Sorry if this came along wrong but gimp was never the source of the problem. I just used it to check the quality and to repaint the normal maps which worked perfectly.
The next place where unwanted bumpiness came in was the MCX Texture converter.
Click to expand...
Not at my home computer... but you will want to de-saturate the colors of the texture, you can't remove the colors. Then, using the NVidia plug-in to create the normal map. Then use MCX' s Texture converter by loading it and clicking on the blue-like icon to convert the RGB channels of the normal map.

That going by memory but I believe that covers it.



Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk
 
Pyscen said:
Not at my home computer... but you will want to de-saturate the colors of the texture, you can't remove the colors. Then, using the NVidia plug-in to create the normal map. Then use MCX' s Texture converter by loading it and clicking on the blue-like icon to convert the RGB channels of the normal map.

That going by memory but I believe that covers it.



Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Please reread my posts. MCX is the current element causing trouble by adding some offset normals to an area that was perfectly flat before.

Also how can I fix the shading and reflection being cut apart?

issue.jpg
 
Hello

I have read your posts,... and I don't think that MCX is the problem,... I have used MCX to create Bump/Normal maps continuously with no problems what so ever,.. sounds to me that Blender is having problems, baking the normal maps for FSX... Maybe discussing how your creating them within Blender will help? Concerning the windows within your above picture,... seems that they are setup as tri's, instead of Quads,... just guessing there.
 
The faces are quads but of course they are triangulated on export.
Concerning the normal maps: I repainted them after they were baked but the MCX conversion still resulted in a pattern of miscoloured pixels.
 
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