Doom3world

Hi everyone, I successfully rendered somes normal map in the past with the render to texture tool of 3DS Max, but know, it doesn't seem to work anymore and I can't find the damn cause.



So there's like a few boxs, differents high. There's my box with the cage set correctly, and the boxs set inside the model to render. When I render, I see the diffuse map which is correct, but the bumpmap appear all blue. (That's better than the last time, the bump map was rendering the diffuse map o.0)

The settings in the Render to Texture are :

Projection : Enabled
Use Existing Coordinate, for both sub-level and the other.

I added one map, Normal map, set as bump.

And it doesnt work, it's starting to be really annoying, I tryed to attach every little box to make one model, didn't work, tryed different way to position things, switched between differents settings, well I thinks I tryed almost everything and it's still doesn't work. I mean what the hell is going on with that normal map renderer, it was working before...

Hmm I will go check if the normal map of the old model still render...

Yep, my old model still render their normal maps perfectly, so it doesnt come from settings I guess... The only difference is that one is on horizontal, and the other is vertical... I don't thinks it could change anything, I even tryed to move it on vertical, didn't change anything...

Oh my god, those problems are real pain in the ***. There's probably somes little details I don't know and that are never shown in tutorials that can affect everything if done in another way.

Without actually looking at the Max file I can't say much, but for a guess it seems to me those boxes are just normal 90 degree boxes with no angles in the sides. Which basically means when the normal is rendered it's dead on 0 in which case you get blue color in the map.

Yes, looks like you have no slopes in your model, which is the only thing normalmaps record.

Damnit, so it mean that if I want to do bump map that doesn't have any complicated form, I will need to make it manually or something like this?

Thats's damn... this renderer should consider the space used within the cage to make the bump map

I don't think you understand quite how normal maps work, I suggest you do some reading up on the subject and then you can understand why you're getting a solid blue render and what you can do to "fix" it.

Yeah, I had realized that the height level was not taken in count, as if you compare two different level, they got the same color. The only things that is coloried is the corner, but my map was rendering from the top so, the corner were not visible.

I did it manually tought, with a hand made height map, and the nvidia tool to colorize the corner.

But yeah, I understand it but, I only found this new fact about it today, and I didn't thought about that right after.

I was sure that the normal map was calculing the height + the lights from the differents axis. Now, I know it


Oh and thanks, otherwise I would still be spending time in trying to get the normal map render in 3ds max ;P

I'm not sure in 3D max case, but I think you can bake additional bump maps/procedurals into the normal map..


So you apply a height map on your model, and when you do the baking Max should create a normal map based on your hi poly/low poly meshes PLUS the bump maps embedded into the resulting texture..

In Maya works really well..

yea, max does this. also the latest beta of crazybump blends two normal maps together, which is handy.

How can I make a lightmap in 3DS Max 08 for use in a game? I really don't understand how to do this at all. I just need to pre render a lightmap, save it, and import a level into my game. Can anyone point me to a tutorial on this? I need instructions for the 2008 release too, 3DS Max is to big and I can't figure it out.
Please help!

Set your scene lights as you want, create your objects UVs, then render-to-texture -> lighting map.
It will create a lightmap for your selected object.