Renderbumpflat - No Smoothing At All...

[BlackThief]

can anyone tell me, why my normalmaps rendered with renderbupflat look so horrible?? there doesn't seem to be any smoothing at all and the normalmap looks a bit screwed up, eventhough the model has got a prefect and clean wireframe

here's a little test-normalmap I created:

you see all those horizontal and vertical lines? and at the top and the bottom you can even see the triangles of the wireframe, eventhough this surface is perfectly flat.

 

the whole thing rendered with renderbump:

 

everything looks perfectly smooth. but it's quite annyoing to create a flat mesh and uv-map it everytime you want to create a normalmap....

[oDDity]

Never used renderbunpflat, but it look like teh shit to me, and in more ways than one. Proper renderbump gives you a deeper 3d quality as well.

[Fingernail]

?

 

works fine for me. Did you remember smoothing?

[BlackThief]

sure - smoothing is around 90°

[oDDity]

Why are you using renderbumpflat in the firstplace?

[Fingernail]

Faster for flat textures. And it always works for me. I'm fairly puzzled, especially since they use the same algorithm according to iddevnet.

[BlackThief]

well I just browsed through our mansion textures and came across a normalmap created by Tyrot - it's got exactly the same problem: there's no smoothing at all. try it yourself - make a model like the one above and try renderbumpflat.

[Fingernail]

[BlackThief]

hm, that's weird. looks like I'm doing something wrong. can you upload that model?

[Fingernail]

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/window02.lwo

[BlackThief]

ehm, which command do use? this one

renderbumpflat -size x y path\path\mymodel.lwo

?

 

that's what I get with this command:

http://www.thedarkmod.de/intern_screens/window_normal.jpg

[Fingernail]

yup, that exact thing. With the size variables at 512 x 1024, although the original is twice the size. Just tried it again, it produced an equally smooth image to the one above.

 

Strange.

[oDDity]

You obviously have to be a native English speaekr to use it. THat's why you and Tyrot are having problems.

BTW, have you tired rendering a renderbumpflat and a renderbump and comparing them in the game to see if one looks better?

Certainly if you look at the two images in the first post you can see that the second renderbump one looks much deeper.