This CryEngine new tool 'NoMaps' could be a good addition to Unity

Frpmta · Dec 1, 2015

http://cryengine.com/news/looking-ahead-at-things-to-come-nomaps

The main purpose of NoMaps is the baking of high-poly mesh topology into a tangent space normal map used on a low-poly mesh. It’s a common occurrence in game development. The software would project the high-poly mesh onto the low-poly mesh and extract the local surface directions, encoding them in a tangent-space normal map.

Now, the problem is that the creation of the tangent-space itself is done in the renderer, and any baker needs to match the renderer absolutely perfectly, or the shading goes at the very least a bit weird, if not totally broken. So, in the past when you tried to do this for CRYENGINE you had to use software which assumed that our renderer did the tangent-space in this and this way, while it was not. So the maps were essentially always somewhat wrong, and people tended to repair it by hand in Photoshop based on visual inspection, or simple accepted the slightly off bake.

NoMaps is made using the CRYENGINE codebase, and the tangent-space is precisely the same as in the renderer. I’m pretty sure that NoMaps is the first piece of software which “simulates” our renderer perfectly, allowing bakes which can’t be improved on from a “correctness” perspective.
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No more 'guessing work' about texture spaces matching or not.
What do you think?

Tiny-Man · Dec 1, 2015

XNormal has a unity tangent space plugin already.

Magpul · Dec 1, 2015

Blender have a AST Landscape + Xnormal Bake tools addon, and we can sculpt maps inside one tool.

steego · Dec 1, 2015

Tiny Man said: ↑

XNormal has a unity tangent space plugin already.
Click to expand...

Also don't forget, 5.3 will be getting mikktspace, from beta release notes:

Integrated the industry standard for tangent space "mikktspace" into Unity. This allows artists to get seamless lighting since compatiblity is ensured between normal map baker and renderer (particular xNormal and several other bakers).

Frpmta · Dec 1, 2015

steego said: ↑

Also don't forget, 5.3 will be getting mikktspace, from beta release notes:

Integrated the industry standard for tangent space "mikktspace" into Unity. This allows artists to get seamless lighting since compatiblity is ensured between normal map baker and renderer (particular xNormal and several other bakers).

Click to expand...

Well, this is basically the same thing as the OP but better.

You can close this thread now.

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