80prozent, the ball test was a good idea. It simplifies my tests. Thanks for that. I’m still using a Blender-exported ball with normal maps, and I had the idea to look at it with the MeshDebugger like I did my human model. Nothing was strange about the normals or vertex normals BUT the tangents are split, like vertex normals are for MD5.

I haven’t gotten a chance to try a Max/Maya generated normal map. I’ll report back on that when I can.

Incidentally, what 3D model format are you using with the CS4 normal maps?

hi finally we got this to page 3

normalMaps from cs4 = normal Maps from c4d ?

to export from c4d to away3d, i am using a selfmade awd2 exporter. i am planning on releasing it as soon as i got rid of some minor bugs.
i had a hard time with uv-seams too, but finally it was all about the normals having to be calculated by c4ds-phong tag correctly. i did not encounter any issues with normalMaps, they just worked on first try. (they are not exported via awd2 right now, i have to put them on my model after its loadet in away3d)

edit: when the tangents are off, maybe thats causing the problems. maybe the tangents get auto-calculated before the normalData is set…that could explain the issues. (mesh loadet with autoderiveTangents = true and autoderiveNormals = true, than the normals are set manually (autoderiveNormals = false), but the tangents are still autoderived (but wrong))
to be honest i dont know much about tangents in away3d or any other 3d-app. richard olsen once wrote somewhere that you would nearly never have to set them by “hand”, but they are needed for some of the shading stuff going on under the hood.

After more research, I’ve learned that:
- The normal maps seams issue is one that plagues other 3D engines too: JMonkey, Ogre, and XNA all suffer from it.
- The problem is that the normal map generator and the 3D engine must use the same math. It’s more or less a codec issue, like Audacity encoding a song with AAC and then your custom player not including the AAC decoder. At least that’s my understanding.

I’ve been trying to compile a special version of Blender which exposes its vertex tangents to the Blender Python API, so I can export them and feed them to Away3D and not let them be autoderived, but something’s going wrong with the patching process b/c after compiling, not all of what’s supposed to be exposed is in fact exposed.

Edit: Nevermind. I got it compiled and have access to Blender’s vertex tangent data. Now let’s see about this export script…

For future Googlers’ sake: I finished the script and an Away3D parser to handle it, and Fabrice included the parser in PreFab.

Links:
SOUR 3D Format ~ Away3D Forum Post
PreFab