quote:

---

bayraitt wrote:
-take the two tga files this command creates and assign them in a shader to the original lo.obj object.

---

I've added .obj file support to NormalMapper so you don't need to use the exporters to make raw triangle files.

http://subd.4t.com/normalmapper/NormalMapper.zip
I don't want to bug you all for every change I make so I made a progress page that you can check now and again to see what has changed and what I'm planning to do next. Sorry for the ads. That's what I get for being a cheapskate

http://subd.4t.com/normalmapper/progress.html

I wanted to keep this as a surprise, but I don't want anyone to worry about not being able to view their displacement mapped models. I am working on a program to view displacement mapped models in real-time. I'll post it when it is ready.

-mike



[Edited by mikeb on 04-07-2003 at 06:08 PM GMT]

Hi ,
The information and knowledge that is shared in this forum is exceptional!
...and since I know a thing or two about ZBrush , it is an excellent opportunity to join the fun and share some relevant information + eye candy

To get started, I'll post some some older beta-test images of ZBrush’s displacement maps...


Image2

gif-anim

If you are interested in learning more about these ZBrush’s features, I will (time permitting) post more information and recent test-images.

Cheers
-Pixolator


[Edited by Pixolator on 03-14-2003 at 02:05 PM GMT]

Hi Pixolator,

Funny thing I was just thinking about what a good thing it would be if some ZBrush user could share some tips as it seems it is the tool of choice of many people at the moment to detail models!

As for myself I have finished a Renderman version of the calculate displacement shader, which also has the advantage of making the source code that was used in my plugins public. I was quite nicely surprised by bakeAir quality, it seems to be devoid of most Mental Ray artefacts in the generated maps that were bugging me. Note what nice difference using subdivision surfaces makes compared with the last exemple I posted, no normal map is yet used here!

Same old test model...



You can get the source code, RIB files and everything there :

http://www.drone.org/tutorials/displacement_maps_air.html

As I'm not sure to have time to update these tools as often as I'd want, the .sl source here can be used, reused and modified if some find it handy!

Alas bakeAir isn't free, so I'm having great hope in mikeb work


[Edited by Olivier on 03-16-2003 at 10:08 PM GMT]

Just spotted this ::

http://www.deathfall.com/article.php?sid=1787

Aqsis now has "Texture baking support. SL now has functions to output any data of type float, color, or point to a custom file format and there is a bake2tif plugin for teqser to convert them to tiff. "

As the whole project is open source it might provide a (free) alternative to bakeAir.

Here's a link to a plug-in to Lightwave that does this kind of thing.
[url http://www.evs3d.com/mw_intro.html
Does anyone know of a realtime object viewer that will display a normal mapped low-poly object? I'd like to generate these textured models to show in my portfolio, but without a game engine that supports it, I wouldn't know what to do with the results.

Thanks


[Edited by rsmith3d on 03-17-2003 at 09:33 PM GMT]

Rebo, have you figured out Aqsis' texture baker yet? I'm going to take a stab at it pretty soon and I noticed you over on the Aqsis forum.

Here is another toolset, created by Owen Roberts. It also uses BakeAIR to generate the displacement maps, in this case 16bit greyscale, and a custom shader to render them. Very nice results! Especially considering the 256x256 limitation of the BakeAIR demo. http://www.seanomlor.com/owenr/

Also, I am mirroring MikeB's tool, so for the avid pop-up haters: http://www.seanomlor.com/mikeb/

rsmith: There is a viewer that comes with ATI's NormalMapper that will show the normal maps, and MikeB's soon to be released tool will show the displacement. I'm not sure how you would integrate these apps into your portfolio, but you could probably hack them somehow. Or just use a screen capture tool to grab AVI's of you rotating your models around in the apps.

Sean.

[Edited by somlor on 03-19-2003 at 05:39 AM GMT]

Hi again,

There has been some (I think useful) exchange of views between Owen Roberts and me. I pointed a couple of issues in his shader that are now fixed, and on my side I realized I could get much better results by tweaking Air/bakeAir paramaters.

Also I modified my shader so that it can either output the "split channel" red and green displacement maps, or the "classic" gray scale ones (makes it alltogether compatible with the traditionnal way shaders express and use displacement in Renderman).

I don't know when I'll have tiem to reflect that in the page but you can already grab the corrected version here :
http://www.drone.org/tutorials/displacement_maps_air_objects/bakeTorso.zip

Now I'm getting similar quality results, even with low res (256x256) maps, so I consider it "finished".

As for making it work for Aqsis (or even Prman), I think all the sources needed are available here, on the Renderman repository www.renderman.org) :

http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Books/sig02.course16.pdf.gz

in Larry Gritz's "A Recipe for Texture Baking", the source code is also available :

http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Books/sig02.course16.xtra.tgz

So good luck with the work on it !

Olivier

256 and 512 maps :

Great stuff Olivier!

I just wanted to mention that an updated version of Owen Robert's DispBake (53KB) is available at http://www.seanomlor.com/owenr

- fixed reflection-bias error in hires_bake_mat.rib
- distancepass.sl now uses linear interpolation instead of smoothstep
- more intuitive Km value in displacement materials, ie double the distancepass-bound
- removed lores_bake.rib for easier workflow
- other minor changes

It presently works with AIR+BakeAIR.

It would be nice if we could also adapt it for Aqsis to get around the 256x256 limit. Has anybody tried baking textures with Aqsis? Were there problems? I'd imagine we'd have to use BMRT as a rayserver to do the offset detection. Are there other bakers on the horizon? Maybe the 3Delight team will release one soon.

Oh, also... if you haven't noticed, Michael Bunnell has updated his modifications to NormalMapper.exe. Check it out: http://www.seanomlor.com/mikeb/

Sean.

[Edited by somlor on 03-28-2003 at 10:23 PM GMT]

Hi again, glad this thread is still going. I spent about 2 nights wrestling with aqsis, unfortunately I found it a nightmare to setup, the project does seem to still be in its infancy as far as user friendlyness goes. Even I think its baking facility has alot of potential tho, as its currently the only free option, its just a shame i couldnt get it to work =/.

http://www.computer.org/proceedings/ca/0683/06830146abs.htm

workflow of choice seems to be :
I have a directory where I write my files named:

lo.obj (this has clean UV's)
hi.obj (this has been detailed in Zbrush)

I create a text file in that directory called "go.bat". I edit that bat file in wordpad and add the following line:

NormalMapper -vsSh lo.obj hi.obj 512 512 1 lo_displace_hi.tif

I then write my files to that directory. and double click on the .bat file, go get coffee. when I come back, the images are waiting in the directory for me.

I then hook up the displacement and normal maps into my renderer of choice (see olivier's methods) and am off to the races with a low resolution cage to rig and animate that just happens to look rockin when its rendered.

-b

note: make sure there are normals in the obj file. I don't think Zbrush supports this at the moment, so you might need to add normals elsewhere. mike is this still necessary?



[Edited by bayraitt on 04-02-2003 at 05:23 AM GMT]

I'm trying to establish a workflow through Lightwave using NormalMapper. It seems to work fine, except for the errors along the UV edges (see head, top left). I think that this is due to aliased edges (see blue circle). In an earlier post, regarding a different normal mapping tool, it was recommended that this problem should be editted by hand. Is this the case with Normalmapper? Is there any way to prepare the model to minimize this effect?

Thanks!

quote:

---

bayraitt wrote:
note: make sure there are normals in the obj file. I don't think Zbrush supports this at the moment, so you might need to add normals elsewhere. mike is this still necessary?

---

MikeB, I tried your tool and everything seemed to be going fine but all I got out of it was a black image. (not to get too software specific) I'm using Lightwave and can't seem to get your tool to give me anything other than a black image, regardless of the time it takes processing it....

rsmith3d, any advice for a LW user (could you email me baby-steps as to how you got as far as you did?)

--following the instructions on this site:
http://www.seanomlor.com/mikeb/

Sorry if this is too software specific, but I just wanted to tell Mike Rb and any other LW users trying to get this to work that lightwave does not export obj's with UV maps directly, you have to use something like Polytrans.



[Edited by rsmith3d on 04-07-2003 at 06:41 PM GMT]

[Edited by rsmith3d on 04-07-2003 at 06:44 PM GMT]

Incredible tools guys, great work.

MikeB, I downloaded your NormalMapper files yesterday, but it seems that the displacement maps are outputting grayscale. I know you mentioned that you had updated to output red/green as to be compatible with Oliver's setup. Did I do something wrong or miss a flag? I placed your files in my ATI NormalMapper directory.

Also, the tifs that were generated looked good (comparable in purplish-look to Bay's example images), but mental ray for Maya was throwing errors when I hooked them up to Oliver's Displacement/Normals shading network for mental ray. The header info was unrecognized... So, I opened in photoshop and simply saved back out as tif, and that corrected the readability issue.

My renders beyond that point were pretty bad and it was pretty late...not sure if that's the grayscale displacement doing that or user error Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I simply applied Oliver's shading network to my lo-res (properly uv'd) object, and then swapped the bust's normal/displacement images out with my new tifs generated from MikeB's files. This is the correct procedure for mental/maya, yes?

I'm still running to catch up on these techniques but I'll work with this more tonight. Thanks again to everyone here for making these tools accessible, it's an exciting prospect.

Glad to see a new session based on this too, btw. I would like to participate if I can get up and running.

Thanks

http://www.3dkingdoms.com/web/tutorial.htm


____________________________
bill jacoby

Big thanks to Mike Bunnell for helping me out. I was ripping out 16bit grayscales with the flag '-vsSh'. He had me drop the 'h', and the 8bit red/green displacement images arrive like so:

NormalMapper.exe -vsS lo.obj hi.obj 512 512 1 lo_displace_hi.tif

--

Unfortunately, Maya now crashes when I plug these images into Oliver's mentalray shader. So close, but yet so far... I will explain my simple test procedure as follows (those of you uninterested in using mentalray/Maya to render, please disregard):

-I created a simple lo-poly sphere, averaged normals, spherical uv-mapped, scaled down within 0 to 1 threshold...clean. Saved as lo.obj (exported normals in the process)

-I then smoothed that same spehere a couple times and pulled some vertices in/out to create my hi.obj

-ran NormalMapper as described above, with both .obj's in the ATI folder, and it output two beautiful files as planned. (8bit red/green and purplish normal map).

-opened Oliver's (unaltered) Maya file, 'rayDisplaceMentalShaders.ma'. I render with mentalray and, it works! The torso renders without error.

-import lo.obj sphere; I light link it verbatim as the torso model is and link it to the same selection set as the torso (just in case). I applied the entire shading group 'lambertDisplaceAndNormals' to the lo-poly sphere. Everything is hooked up identically in hypergraph/hypershade.

-I delete the torso geometry, and then hookup my ATI normal and displacement .tifs (Maya accepts them lovingly, thanks Mike!).

-Everything is in place, ready to render (save file). I select 'render using mentalray'....and *crash*. Maya dies, every time, even after reboot.

Questions:
1. What did I do wrong?
2. Do I need to use Oliver's baking method of extracting the displacement/normal maps (in lieu of the ATI/MikeB's tool) if I am to use Oliver's shading network? I sure do like the apparent simplicity of the ATI route.

Thanks for your help (hopefully this will also assist everyone out there using Maya for rendering as well).


http://www.3dgamers.com/screenshots/games/doom3/

____________________________
bill jacoby

Ok. I sleuthed the Maya crashing issue some more and I now have mental ray cooperating with me and Oliver's shader.

The culprit is the .tif files that the NormalMapper is writing out. The 8-bit files are accepted by Maya when introduced to the shader network, but at render time it chokes.

The solution: open the images in Photoshop and save back out as .tif (in my case, using IBM PC byte order, as I'm on winXP).

I then went back and output the 16bit grayscale displacements and plugged that in, but it doesn't seem to be compatible with this shader setup. If I can find a way to make the 16bit files work with mental ray I'll post it.

Thanks for your help, and again, I bow to the innovators of these tools.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/mentalray.shtml

____________________________
bill jacoby

First off, I’m new to the forum and really blown away by the content. I’ll endeavor to respect the rules and I apologize in advance for any silly questions that might appear below.

I’m particularly interested to see how this workflow will relate to real time 3D games (The Doom3 thread touches on this as well). Products shipping this year such as Doom3 or Halflife2 will be using normal maps to deform both world geometry and character models. High-end first-person shooter character modelers are trying to make the jump from low to high res and the few I know tell me they’re really struggling with the workflow. No more model/skin/rig every four days.

Anyway, I have no doubt that the process discussed above will be huge for future games, but I’m also wondering if it could be helpful for existing real time renders that don’t support normal map deformation. If I’m not mistaken, that basically limits you to baking the detail from your high res model to a 2d texture. Nevertheless, it seems like you could get some pretty cool results with this workflow to make higher quality rendered textures or skins (for your Q3s or Unreal 2s). Does anybody know if any released games are doing anything similar to this? Also, assuming your high res character model derives its uvs from the base mesh, can 3D apps actually bake shaders like this using the normals for projection (i.e. LW’s baker, Maya’s convettofiletexture, raybake, etc.)? Just wondering. Thanks for the stimulating reading even if some was over my head.

Murphy

The link below isn’t really jaw dropping but it’s kind of cool. It’s web 3d done exclusively with java virtual machine, sans any kind of plug-in.

www.holomatix.com


____________________________
murphy

Hi Murphy,

This workflow can work for real-time. Check out our discussion on this link:

http://cube.phlatt.net/forums/spiraloid/viewtopic.php?TopicID=395
Some neat stuff there.

I have a very valuable link for those of us that use LW:

http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html

It has a freeware set of plugins for the creation, and use of normal maps in Lightwave. It works really well and even has some tips to help eliminate the seams in the LW normal renders...



Mike

This works really really well... I need to give it a shot with quemloss3 poly reducer, which keeps morphs intact!

Mike

the LW plug in action... (with a model done in mirai.. )

Mike

Mike RB, just got "Microwave" at work a couple of weeks back, and been wondering about other uses for it apart from straight baking & normal maps, specifically baking displacements for use with LW.

Thanks to this thread I had the following idea:

Given that Microwave can do ordinary texture bakes through transparent geometry (it can trace a ray through the surface to whatever is behind it)...I reckon... here it comes...that giving the mesh to be baked a thickness based shader, would give you a B&W displacement map. Without jumping through any hoops to get there.
The only thing to keep in mind I can think of right now, is that because of the thickness shader, we need to make sure the low-res mesh is surrounding the detail mesh and not intersecting it, and also perhaps taking care that any "void" isn't visible through a polys normal.

I dont have Microwave at home so I cant try it just now but I think this could work.
Can any programers here think of a reason why this cant work?
I'll sure find out tomorrow

Look here for an example of Microwave baking volumetrics enclosed in geometry:

http://www.evasion3d.com/gfx/mw/pics/x_hv.html

Cheers

Serg

I think marvin landis (who wrote the LW normal mapper) is planning to add a displacement option...

Mike

I thought I would post a couple comparisons of normal mapping and displacement mapping.

Here is Bay's model with some extra bumps added. The first image is the original 36,000 poly high-res Catmull-Clark subd model adaptively subdivided to about 120,000 tris. Next, a normal mapped 1,500 quad lo-res model. Last the same 1,500 quad model with Catmull-Clark subdivision and displacement mapping.

http://subd.4t.com/bgorig.jpg
http://subd.4t.com/bgnormal.jpg
http://subd.4t.com/bgdmap.jpg

Here is another example, which I kindly refer to as the pile of rocks. First, the original model, which is a lot of individual models really. Next, there is the normal-mapped 10 quad model, and last is the displacement mapped subd surface using the same 10 quad model.






[Edited by mikeb on 05-07-2003 at 12:02 AM GMT]

let me say that this is a very nice thread and has forced me learn alot of new techniques. I would like to participate in the session I am only having a problem with the normal mapper. Ive tried exporting my max files as .nmf and .obj I keep getting
error: no visible triangles found!

anything I might have missed? Thanks for any help.

link:
http://research.microsoft.com/~hoppe/dss.pdf
http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~pvs/research/silclip/


[Edited by overlord on 05-06-2003 at 10:22 PM GMT]

Off topic note: please refrain from advertising on this forum. It is not the place for that, and all such posts will be deleted. Thank you.


____________________________
Tamás Varga
www.3dluvr.com/ly

great information and very inspiring samples in this thread

has anyone besides me tried out ORB?
http://www.soclab.bth.se/practices/orb.html

worked fine for me even on the first try. it accepts OBJ and (probably MAX-specific) ASC and ASE-files and works quite fast. although i haven't tried this feature, it seems that it even supports automatic generation of mapping coordinates on the low-res surface.

First off, I'd like to say hello. My first post!

I was just wondering if anyone knows how to use the normal map created with the ATI normal mapper, with prman displacements. I can figure out how to use an RGBA map to control XYZ and N, yet someone told me that the output of the normal mapper uses red as up, and green as down. Now, seeing as how I cannot figure out how to seperate a vector from two different colors I am having a heck of a time trying to get this to work. Anyone have an idea?

Ritchie Roberts
http://www.zeroneuro.com