» Wed Dec 22, 2010 3:21 am
don't use absolute file paths for your textures. the file path more correctly would begin simply as textures\ not c:\programs...
I think you have shading issues resulting from an incorrect bake- I think you must have only baked half of the lowpoly blade, the mesh has to be complete at those edges of the UV even if you are mirroring the texture> this causes the vertex normals change, Or your face normals on the low poly changed from when the bake occured, this seems to be is evident at the spike bits towards the base of the blade, and the blade edge. general info for baking normals(for basically any game, as none currently have a shader written into them that allows to disregard this) you have to split UV seams at all hard edges for a correct bake, ie all smooth groups need to be a their own separate UV island. those faces at the base of the spikes on the blade, i see they have their own smoothing group, that needs to be split off.
I am curious why not bake the skull too? it would take a very short amount of time to have made a subD version that would be useful for baking a normal map from.
speaking of mirroring UVs- you will run into some freaking lighting issues when overlaying UV islands that are mirrored at a UV seam, See this mini tut I made for more detail:
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=198
the normal map is hella noisey. It has suffered disastrously from compression artifacts too.
The in-game screens show that the normal map is not functioning correctly. This is because the vertex normals were not correctly exported, well they might have, but you probably left them in your exported nif...this is because you pasted over a vanilla trishape with your mesh right?
I think splitting your UV mid blade is not the best idea, though it'll work no prob> you have correctly orientated the 2 UV shells and have the seams on a flat U axis. Which is the right way to lay that
also, DXT3 for the normal map? the spec map is now just a bunch of pixels, which imo further makes is very pixelated, and DXT3 for me in the spec really contributes to a 'banding' effect on the mesh. DXT3 only stores 16 shades of grey in the alpha channel, imo that's not a whole lot. DXT5 ftw, it'll preserve your specular maps more accurately.
Aaannyway.....
I believe that if you ignore everything I just said, you might simply get away with opening the nif in nifskope, spells>batch>update all tangent spaces. this recalculates your swords vertex normals. and is something I always do in nifskope with all my assets, as sometimes the max exporter fubars them up a bit, so it's good practice tp do even if you weren't copy/pasting over things.
if there is still an issue, I would imagine its the vertex normals being funky at the UV seams. so you will have to offset the UVs. which I would do anyway for the blade because you will probably encounter a lighting issue after updating tangent space, as the blades UV is mirror overlayed.
