Plumbing

Description:

The Quest for Perfect Normals. All seams marked sharp(hard), all hard edges marked as sharp(hard). Use xNormals with a cage to bake normals. Blender and other apps, introduce unwanted noise. It is easy to see the noise if you make the object 100% relfective in a PBR viewer. Second goal, gloss and specular maps displaying properly realtime in Blender. See Michael Hosticka's guide on Perfect Normals here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww and BlendheadJSM's Blender to Xnormals here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkES2oodLhw. Check Spec and Gloss map settings on material in the Blender file.

Perfect Normal Fundemetals: Smoothing Groups, UV's and Cages. With this process you end up with more islands, which I thought might be an issue in dDo, but infact, dDo see's the seams better when the normals and hardening is correct.

I bag on cycles a lot, slow, hard to use and baking support is limited for game objects. On the other hand GLSL is realtime and can look as good if not better. Now that I have both perfect normals and spec/gloss maps working in Blender, I can preview my dDo results in Blender, before moving on to Unity. No nodes, no cycles and realtime. What a concept!

NB: Leave "marked sharp(hard)" edges on textured low poly as well or you will see the seams. Use triangulate modifer in Blender instead of letting the obj export decide. This is key to avoiding vertex errors between low poly and cage. The have to be identical, down to the vertex count and order. If they aren't Xnormals will tell you. A common issue is scaling the cage in edit mode. Scale and apply in object mode if possible.