XNormal
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xNormal is an application to bake normal/displacement/ambient occlusion maps from a very high polygonal mesh into a lowpoly one. Also provides a tool set to convert height maps to normal maps.
The final 3.11.0 has been released!
July 20, 2007
- Added full screen antialiasing support for the DX9 graphics driver.
- Added a checkbox inside the 3D viewer to lock the position of the light to the camera. Notice the shadows dissapear when you enable this mode(which is logical on the other hand)...
- ATI viewer problems solved(I hope...)
- Changed the default normal map back color to that nice blue we all luv!
- Added a checkbox to auto center the camera orbit point in the 3D viewer.
- Distributed rendering with hxGrid
- Added "attenuation" and "jitter" options to the ambient occlusion generation. Also improved a lot the quality of the AO generation. Caution when you set the # of rays... now with 32 you can get the same results than 200 before.
- Modified internally the memory manager to allow to use RAM more efficiently. That increases a lot the polygon limits.
- Solved a crash bug when you set the render maps width and height different.
- Added a two new Photoshop filters: the dilation filter and the normalize filter.
- Now the grid is a plane, not lines.
- Solved a problem that was causing the 3DSMAX6/7/8 exporter not to be loaded using 3DSMAX 6 and 7.
- Added projective caustics/translucent shadows to the 3D viewer ( see Bojana's example ).
- Now the DX9 graphics driver will use high-quality floating-point normal maps if your graphics card can filter/mipmap them correctly.
- Added axis indicators to the referenceCubemap.jpg.
- Rolled back to the DirectX April 2007 edition due to problems with the June 2007 one ( debug mode is broken, speed loss, etc... ).
- Added a new tool: the object/tangent space converter.
- Added a "mesh scale" parameter to control the conversion units when importing geometry.
- Solved some hang problems with multi-core CPUs when showing the progress window.
- Corrected tons of bugs and improved the UI accesibility with tab order.
Enjoy it!
xNormal 3.10.6
10 Jun 2007
- Added two new examples from Howard Day and Vidar Rapp.
- Added an option to render a cheap and fast AO map from a lowpoly model + a normal map.
- Improved numerical stability and memory efficiency.
- Rewritten the multicore renderer.
- Added the 8MonkeyLabs mesh importer for their upcoming game Darkest of days
- Two new tools: the heightmap to occlusion and PhotoNormal to generate normal maps from photographs. Also added the normal map to cavity methods.
- Added automatic camera and light rotation in the 3D viewer.
- Added antialiased/non-antialiased map mask output files.
- Solved tons of bugs
xNormal 3.10.5
29 Apr 2007
Just uploaded the 3.10.5 with some bugs corrected, a SBM mesh exporter port for old 3dsmax version(6/7/8) and recompiled the image filters to support the new Photoshop CS3.
xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / parallax displacement maps. It also includes an interactive 3D viewer with multiple meshes and textures formats support ( including COLLADA 1.4 ). The idea is to model the highpoly and lowpoly models with your favourite program ( 3dsmax, maya, xsi, lw, silo, blender, zbrush, modo, mudbox, etc...) and then pass them to xNormal to bake some maps easy and fast.
xNormal 3.10.4 has been released.
16 Apr 2007
- Improved AO rendering speed.
- Added a "bent normals / unoccluded direction" map generation.
- Added MIN/MAX rendering values for almost all the maps. You can use to control the bright/contrast with that.
- Now you can use the "AO Bias" option to eliminate surface self-collision problems.
- Also added a new AO distribution model, the "Random" one, which is very useful to add some dirt to the shadow areas.
- Solved some bugs in the OpenGL graphics driver painting the highpoly models and also some problems in the DX9 graphics driver rendering meshes.
- Added an option to ignore the ray hit if the highpoly normal and the lowpoly one are opposite ( to solve reversed-normal problems ).
- Added a Photoshop PSD image importer.
- Added Photoshop CS/CS2 filters for the xNormal height map to normal map and normal map to cavity map tool.
- Added 3DSMAX 9 .SBM mesh importer/exporter plugins with complete cage support ( with the "Projection Modifier" ).
- Added support for the HD Photo ( Windows Media Photo ) image format which allows to compress ( a lot! ) with much more quality than the JPGs and close or even better than the JPEG2000 image format. It includes support for alpha channels and can be lossy or lossless.
- Added a new amazing example created by Bojana Nedeljkovic for the Dominance War 2 contest. I wish her the best luck to win!
- Also added other incredible Diablo 3 example created by Samuel Arshlevon for the Blizzard 2006 contest.
- Added a new tool to generate a cavity map approximation from a tangent-space normal map.
- Changed the old installer by the new and better NullSoft Scriptable Install System one.
- Finally, solved a lot of minor bugs ( numeric up-down increment revised, black sand remover configure button, degenerated triangle-cages crash, etc... )