Horde3D

First off, hello! This is my first time posting but I've been using Horde3D for a little while now.

My issue is with normal maps specifically not displaying properly on the model in the game engine. For some reason the textures are being smeared around the model instead of displaying how I would expect them to. I'm unsure whether this is my being new at creating normal maps or a problem with the game engine (or my implementation).

Is it apparent what I'm doing wrong here? Any help is greatly appreciated.

http://tinyurl.com/27h9ema (normal map not working and smearing)
http://tinyurl.com/2a94gzm (normal map "working" but still smearing)

-Patrick

Without knowing what exactly you are doing (did you create this model with a design tool and exported it the normal collada way?) I would guess that there's either something wrong with the normal map or the texture coordinates.
If you are using a collada file, what design tool/exporter did you use?

This was a pre-rigged, pre-texture mapped model that came with Poser Pro. I made adjustments to the model in 3dsMax, exported from Max as collada, and used the horde collada converter to get the stuff into the game engine. The normal map was made in Photoshop and wasn't included with the model.

Any ideas as to what could have messed up my texture coordinates and possible solutions? Re-texture map the model?

Thanks for the hasty response!

-Patrick

So you had the model correctly set up with the normal map in 3Ds max, and it's rendered correctly within 3Ds?
If that's the case, it should be a problem either in the exporter or the converter (Maybe providing the collada file and textures may help then to solve the problem). If not, there's something wrong with the model itself.

Note: Max's built-in collada exporter sucks. Try exporting it with opencollada plugin, it may help.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I have OpenCollada installed but I don't think that is what I used. I will give that a try and do a little bit more testing to make sure this is a problem just with Horde3D.

While I'm not 100% sure this won't happen for this particular normal map in 3dsMax, in the past I saw the exact same effect when I tried to apply a bump map to the model in Horde3d (that definitely worked in Max).

Although I've seen the terms 'bump map' and 'normal map' used interchangeably, they seem like two very different things. Are BOTH normal and bump maps supported? Do they use the same flags in their material.xml files?

Thanks again and I'll report back once I've played with it some more.

-Patrick

Bump maps are not "given" in horde, but can be made in the shader as far as I know, same way as it's done with the normal maps (from what I can see) it;s just that bump maps are older and give less detail in my opinion.

I have had the same thing (and right now, still have). As a test we just made a cube with some normal map and it worked just fine so there's no doubt that normal maps work, but with the model of a rock we made, the normal seemed not to work (at all), thing is, in my case this could be the case in lack of light and a rather noisy texture.

Anyway, the only time I encountered the smearing was through the use of the parralax mapping instead of normal mapping (in the material), but I don't really know what differs internally between the two so yeah :p