Renderbump issues

[Baddcog]

 

There it is, my new lockbox local map.

 

I believe I did everything correctly:

 

1-modeled low poly version (100 polys) and centered it on the grid.

 

2-modeled hi-poly vers (1,000 polys) and it is centered on grid, surrounds low polys version. polys as close as possible with no overlapping polys.

 

3-exported each seperately, made a shader for renderbump and used the renderbump command.

 

That pic is the cleaned up version (there were some ugly spots here and there and stuff alphad out that weren't supposed to be.)

The most noteable touch-up is the large flat face on front, that was shaded much like the rivets, not a flat color. When light hit it it had a round appearance.

 

So the problem is the bottom of the box should be green but it is a fade, the left side has a fade into green at the top of it. This renders badly as light fades across the surfaces. When I hold the lantern on the left side the bottom left of the box is lit, but the top/left fades to dark.

The whole left side should be lit.

The low poly contains as many polys as it does because I split all soides (2 polys) into 4 to get a better trace (it worked somewhat) as the 2 poly sides were even worse.

 

I'm probably just gonna photoshop or renderbumpflat as I can get pretty good results with both methods, I just don't see why this is being rendered like all sides are round when they are quite flat indeed.

 

My material which is straight off wiki and I've used for a few things that turned out better

darkmod/lockbox
{
renderbump -size 512 512 -aa 2 -trace 0.5 -colorMap darkmod/models/lockbox_local.tga models/lock_hi.ase
}

[OrbWeaver]

This is a common problem encountered by users new to renderbump (I experienced it myself). The solution is:

 

1. The low-poly model must be COMPLETELY smoothed -- no disjoint faces or unwelded vertices.

2. If you need disjoint (unsmoothed) faces, separate them out in the HIGH-poly model. The difference between the flat-shaded high-poly and the smoothed low-poly will be expressed as the gradient shading you have observed, which cancels out in-game with the smoothed low-poly model to create the necessary flat shading.

 

The reason for this is that the renderbump algorithm takes no account of whether faces are unwelded in the low-poly model, and does not adjust the shading accordingly (it simply assumes that any faces with shared UV coordinates are smoothed). This is why you need to do #1 in order to be consistent with what renderbump is expecting.

[Baddcog]

hmm, I know all verts are welded. I didn't add a smooth modifier though.

 

I went ahead and just renderbumpflat'ed it and got pretty colse to what I wanted in 1 mins work.

 

I'm gonna go ahead and just give this a try though to see what results I get.

 

Thanks

[PinkDot]

For simple geometric models renderbumpflat is better. Or just Photoshop. Renderbump is only good for organic models.

I find it better to use 3d app instead of renderbump. In 3ds max you can use cage for greater control over the direction of projecting rays.

[Baddcog]

The one time i tried to follow the bake tut in Max I had a prob, don't remember exactly but I think the script crashed max.