Wolfire Games Forums

Hi I am trying to make a spiked baseball bat, but the shading is always messed up, like this...

What shader are you using and what does your normal map look like? I'm thinking it might be an issue with using a tangent space normal map with the object space normal map shader.

I am using the typical one, cubemapobjitem
when I use tangent it has no shading at all
and this is my normal map...

Ok, that looks good. I would guess that you'll need to swap and/or flip one or two of the channels in your normal map for it to work like it should. Unfortunately I don't know which ones or how and I don't have time to test it out right now myself.

Please let us know if you figure it out!

Okay will do, thanks for your help

Does anyone know if there is a way to make it use tangent normals without making it a flat object?

It doesn't need to be a flat object to use tangent space normals. Tangent space normals just use the normal map in a way that modifies the underlying normal instead of overriding it entirely.

There are some comparison images and more information on the subject here: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_M ... al_Details

To tell the game that you're trying to use a tangent space normal map, use the version of the shader without "obj" in it. So in your case you should use "cubemapitem" instead of "cubemapobjitem".

When I use a tangent normal map it makes the object look flat even with cubemapitem,
and nothing ever changes when I change the shader name line

Hh, weird. Would you like to zip up the object.xml file as well as the textures and the model so I can take a look and hopefully figure it out?

Sorry I just got back to my computer, (I was gone for the weekend), but sure I will be happy to zip it up and send it to you

Here it is

I tested some things with it and had to ask the rest of the team because I couldn't get it to work either. Apparently it's no longer the "cubemapitem" shader you should use if you want to use a tangent space normal map on an item, but simply the "cubemap" shader.

EDIT1:
I updated the wiki with this information.

Okay thanks! I'll try that

So I did that and now there is definitely shading but it has this strange thing where the whole model lights up and darkens depending on the angle of view...

So you changed it to use the cubemap shader, right? Did you also replace your object space normal map with a tangent space normal map?

If you just want to test the shader with a flat normal map, there is a flat normal map called "blank_TS_white_n.tga" right in the ../Overgrowth/Data/Textures/ folder.