Nvidia Melody tool crashes when loading reference model

[Goragoth]

I've been playing around with generating normal maps over last few days and I've been hitting some strange problems:

First one is mentioned in the title, the models are .obj files exported from Maya (using the built in OBJ exporter). The "working" model (low detail) will load fine but even on very simple models it will fail to load the "reference" model (high detail). It just crashes and asks if I want to send an error report (that doesn't seem to contain anything useful at all). Has anybody used this tool with Maya? Do I need to find a .3ds exporter to make it work (i.e. their .obj loader is bugged) or might there be something else I'm missing?

Secondly the ATI normal mapping tool seems to be working somewhat better (I get output) but the normal maps on the final model seem to have stripes running through them (looks like possibly texture seems) and yes I did have edge padding turned on. I've also been getting some pretty garbled output about 50% of the time.

Lastly I tried the Maya built in tool (transfer surface information I think it's called) and that just gave me an error message saying that I must only have 2 objects selected even when I only had 2 objects selected.

So, has anybody got experience with this? Any tips you would like to share? Maybe some good links (I've googled the subject and most "tutorials" are basically a very simple explanation of what normal mapping is and hardly more).

 

[DeanoC]

The general quality of free normal mapping tools aren't really upto scratch.
The key thing missing from both ATI and NVIDIA's offerings is robustness and support for large meshes.

If your a programmer there is a mesh framework (MeshTools) at http://www.sjbrown.co.uk/meshtools/
However out the box (i.e. without adding an interface) it doesn't do anything.

We have a working normal extractor based on it, which we use at Ninja Theory. I really need to send Simon some patches. The main additions I've done was a dilation filter, command and lua interface (though Simon has one...) and improving the obj loader.

 

[Goragoth]

Thanks for the link, that library does look interesting and perhaps I'll end up using it but at the moment I'm not too keen on writing my own normal mapping tool. I'm just exploring the challenges of creating normal mapped media and I really want something quick and dirty. I think I'll have a look at the ORB tool, that does look very promising, and I'll continue to experiment with the tools I have.
When we start to establish a proper art pipeline for our project wirting our own tool using this library will surely make things a lot easier and faster though.

 

[LeGreg]

The "working" model (low detail) will load fine but even on very simple models it will fail to load the "reference" model (high detail). It just crashes and asks if I want to send an error report .

I think that if it crashes, their developpers would be interested in knowing the details.
you should drop their a line SDKFeedback@nvidia.com

 

[Goragoth]

Hehe, I found out why it crashes: my mesh wasn't triangulated. I finally figured that out when I downloaded the ORB tool and it states specifically that models must be triangulated. Duh!
I think I'll send them an email though, they should really do a simple check and provide a decent error message rather than just crashing.

 

[Sage]

it's not really crashing, it's just clipping everything you don't need to see so that you get a maximal experience.