Road editor - shadow issue on segment model

[xannepan 513]

Hi I am creating castle walls in the road editor. I have this annoying shadow issue on my segment model (see picture). I have already checked out the normals and they are fine. Also I have confirmed I have no flipped uvw faces. Strange thing is that the shadow issue seems dependent on the rotation of the model. Would really appreciate if someone can help me figuring this out.

(I also included the model, the diffuse and normal maps.)

model.rar

[xannepan 513]

By the way: another issue is that segments seem to flip once the walls are placed. Since the walls have battlements only at the outside wall I want to prevent this from happening. So far I haven't figured out how. Strange thing is that in the preview (before plopping the wall) this doesn't seem to happen.

[Avanya 2,605]

I'm not sure about the shadows, but I know how to stop it from flipping the segment. Under the segment properties add "Invert" for the "Forward forbidden" and then it stops flipping the segment.

[xannepan 513]

Thanks Avanya. That fixed the model flipping! Now if I just could find a solution for the shadows. Just found out I have the same issues on ALL my assets. Not only in the road editor. So it must be something in the model... but still have no clue what is wrong :-(

[Avanya 2,605]

Np. I had a look at the model, but you only included the LOD in the .rar file, so it's hard to say what might be causing this. Nothing looked out of order there. Only thing I noted was it's cut in a lot more bits than it needs to. You have it into 32 pieces on the length and 8 would be fine for the LOD (if it's finished and not just a test mesh ofc  ). I noticed your normal map looks a little weird though - it looks like how they look when the specular is added, which it shouldn't when importing.  I'm not sure if this has anything to do with your issue or would be an issue at all, but it might be worth trying. I just did some quick color tweeking (turned up the blue and lowered brightness a bit) and this is more what it should look like.

If you upload the main model I'd be happy to take a look to see if I can spot something that might be up with it. 

[xannepan 513]

Thanks for having a look at it Avanya. The model file is attached here (wasn't aware I only included the LOD initially :-P). 

I'll give it a go with your normal map. The ones I used so far are textures I extracted from the game. I want to make matching assets with the castle ruins included in the game. BUt perhaps modtools messes up normal map textures on export. I'll let you know if it works out with the normal map.

 

 

XAVE_FORT_NW_Wall_1.rar

[xannepan 513]

Tested and confirmed it is working now!!! Thank you so much!!!!

[AmiPolizeiFunk 446]

Modtools sometimes exports normalmaps incorrectly. You have to do a gamma correction on them at .4something-or-other. I can't remember now off the top of my head, but the info is in the forums somewhere.

 

All sorts of things can cause shadow issues. Smoothing problems and f'd up vertice normals are frequent culprits. I don't even know how to see vertice normals in blender (seeing face normals is easy, but vertices?). That seems to be another problem that comes from exporting stuff with modtools. You get these crazy broken shadows. If the shape is simple enough, I will often re-trace the exported mesh from scratch on a new object in blender.

[Avanya 2,605]

Yay that's great to hear!  I guess ModTools is exporting the normal map combined with the specular map again - or at least it did in your case. And at least it was easier to fix than weird normals, which can be a pain on exported meshes.  Looks like a cool wall btw!

[Ronyx69 2,413]

What was exported is an XYS map, which is the normal map and specular combined. 

It's exported at 2.2 (srgb) gamma so you need to apply a 0.45454545 gamma correction to get it back to 1.0 (linear).

The blue channel for the normal map you import doesn't matter at all, as it gets discarded and replaced with the specular map.