normal map inverting in places

[crisw]

hi there

i just downloaded the beta today and have been playing around with things and having fun.

i ve pretty much got all my problems sorted ( other than exporting to XSI and this one )

im getting problems when using a piece of custom geometry exported from XSI. In various places the normals seem to flip ( best way to describe it ). I dont think its the shader as the Nm works fine when on the sphere or torus for example. Possibly export settings - but i never usually have any problems, say when going into and out of zbrush.

Has anyone else come accross anything like this in their travels? Or has any advice on what to try..

thanks

[Ian_]

Hello sorry for not replying sooner, but I have noticed this too. In a lot of cases the normal map I've noticed on can look fine in Mental Mill, but in another program, looks inverted in a vertical or horizontal direction. This can be fixed by inverting the red or green channel on your normal map, which can also be done in Mental Mill. I have written a custom normal map shader for Mental Mill that lets you choose the channel to invert. Hopefully this shader will be as helpful for you, as it is for me. :)

[crisw]

thanks for the reply - i dont think what u described is the problem

heres a pic makes it a bit clearer

its looking at the same point on different geometry - and one of the normal map ( pre normalise ) on the same custom geo

[Ian_]

Umm, again sorry for the delay, I'm not sure of whats wrong with your shader, maybe it has to do with how the normals are angled on those faces, maybe if you can, try manipulating those normals on your model and see if it changes anything. But I'd be glad to try to take a look at it for you, I use 3dsmax, but if you can, upload that model, or any model with the same problem, in a universal file format, the normal map your using and the fx shader. I'll try to see if I can find something wrong.