Export Normal Maps or Relief Maps in FBX?

Export Normal Maps or Relief Maps in FBX?

Hello,
This is my first post and I'm evaluating Cheetah3D as a possible modeler for use with Unity.

If I understand correctly, currently C3D converts the relief maps to normal maps internally for rendering.

When I export an FBX file from C3D, does the relief map get exported or the normal map?

If there are other Unity users here, how are you handling normal maps with C3D?

Thanks,
Brett

C3D doesn't do normal maps right now, it does "bump" maps. AFAIK Unity can convert bump maps to normal maps, and nVidia offers a free plugin to do the same thing.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

The real problem is that C3D won't generate normal maps from the combination of bump maps and more complex geometry. If you want that kind of functionality you'll need a higher end product

Relief Maps

Thanks for the reply. According to Martin here C3D generates a normal map already from the relief map during rendering, so it does support normal maps at least internally it seems.

Upon export, is there a way to get this normal map that was used out? Or is the relief map exported?

Thanks for any help.

Right, but that's no more useful than a normal map you generate yourself directly from a bump map. AFAIK C3D doesn't put textures into FBX files (I could be totally wrong on that), which would include normal/bump maps.

Geometrically calculated normal maps are what I'm talking about -- C3D doesn't do them and bump maps converted to normal maps are no substitute for this functionality.

If you need a solution in the interim, Blender does it:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/Maps/Bump_and_Normal_Maps

You could easily do your normal maps in Blender, but still keep most of your workflow in C3D thus avoiding Blender 2.4x's UI and Blender 2.5's bugs.

Okay, maybe it's my way of thinking that's messing me up.

Basically, it seems Unity supports C3D through FBX files and it seems to work really well importing the mesh including textures.

So I was thinking my workflow would be modeling a higher res mesh in C3D, exporting that to another tool to generate the normal map(s) and then back in C3D adding the normal maps to a lower res mesh object as a normal map so that when exported to Unity, Unity would get the entire mesh with normal maps correctly.

I wasn't looking for C3D to necessarily generate the normal map for me, just recognize what it is and allow me to apply it to an object so that it can be saved with the file, rendered correctly (or at least ignored during rending), and export in the FBX.

Cheers

Well you could do exactly that. The normal map will use the UVs (which could have been generated in C3D), so the only problem will be you can't see your model in all its glory inside C3D itself. (There are programs that will convert a normal map to a bump map, so you *could* actually see it in C3D to an extent -- but to do it properly C3D would need "proper" normal map support.)