Why isn't my normal map working?

[W0RLDBUILDER]

I used Sculptris to make an asteroid model and textures (diffuse, normal) and used Anim8or to set materials and export to CMOD. When rendered in Celestia, however, it looks completely different. I've tried it with LunarLambert both at 1 and turned off, and no matter what it looks completely different from what it looked like in Sculptris. With LunarLambert at 1, it is nearly black with a very bright rim. With it disabled, the surface appears much brighter, but the edges of the normalmapped craters look like someone used black spraypaint to apply them, and the normal map barely has any other effect. What am I doing wrong?


Sculptris with custom material.


LunarLambert off.


LunarLambert at 1.


LunarLambert at 0.5.

[John Van Vliet]

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[W0RLDBUILDER]

I'm not using a cylindrical (or cube) map. Sculptris generates UVs, diffuse textures, and normal maps. I applied the normal map to a sphere (please excuse the lack of polar correction):

It looks like the normal map's OK, so the problem must be in my CMOD. (download)

[W0RLDBUILDER]

I generated normals and tangents in cmodview, and I was able to get this.

As you can see, it has these seams everywhere. Not sure what I can do to fix this besides maybe subdivide the original mesh some more.

[John Van Vliet]

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[W0RLDBUILDER]

I don't really know if it's possible to reproject the textures into a cube map. Sculptris generates .obj files, and I've tried both Selden's Anim8or CMOD export script and cmodview with the same results. To me, it looks like Celestia isn't loading the normal map correctly because of how it's mapped on the mesh.

[Fenerit]

Maybe you must use Animator to change the default mesh triangles in quads, since Sculptris does use triangles as geometry.