[Request] xNormal plugin to match UE4 tangent space

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
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1

Hi,

I’m a strong user of xNormal which is a software that allow users to bake a lot of different textures based on an High-poly and Low-poly mesh difference. However, the default way of xNormal to compute normal maps produce textures that are not totally compatible with the Unreal Engine (3 and probably with version 4).

I know that the FBX importer in UDK/UE3 was updated to import mesh baked with xNormal differently and support a bit better the normals of the mesh used during the bake. However, and even if I know a perfect bake is impossible, I’m sure this system could be grandly improved by creating a dedicated tangent space calculator for xNormal.

This would avoid the need to use additional software to fix the normal maps, such as Handplane : http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116899

I believe a direct and straightforward process such as (example) Maya => xNormal => UE4 could be beneficial in term of usage and will help the engine to be more easy to use and learn to achieve good results. Especially regarding how complicated and technical normal maps can be to make.

To compare a bit : Unity has this plug-in (but I was made by an user of the engine, not by the Unity’s developers) and Crytek also made a plug-in similar in the past for the CryEngine.

Short version : I would like to see a plug-in for xNormal that allow the baking of normal maps matching the tangent space of the Unreal Engine 4.

2

Hi Fabrice,

Thank you for your request. I have created a feedback report and entered in into our database. If there are any other features you would like to see in Rocket, please let us know.

Thanks,

Alexander

3

We have info about creating normal maps with xNormal here:

Creating Normal Maps

4

Hello,

This is a question from the beta version of the engine. We are marking this answered for tracking purposes. If you are experiencing an issue similar to this please post a new question.

Thank you.