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lisa · 8th December 2007, 10:31 PM

The jury's still out on that one.

I've played around with Melody some too, but as of yet I've never been able to get it to do a clean import and export the data without crashing. I have an ATI card at the office, and a Nvidia at home, and it crashes on both.

That said, I don't want to be unfair and write it off without really having tried it, as I know a number of people who like Melody.

I think it depends on what you want to do.

Melody seems to be faster and has a nicer user interface with the built-in preview window. It has *much* better documentation, and does some things that the ATI tool doesn't such as automatic generation of texture coordinates and LOD generation. It also has specialized support for Unreal Engine, as Unreal uses a different tangent-space bias calculation than other engines.

On the flip side, the ATI tool is very robust and has some tricks of its own. For example, you can add a bump map to the high resolution geometry and combine both into your normal map in one pass. In terms of being usable in a production environment, the fact that ATI provides both source code and a command line interface is a significant advantage. The CLI was very clearly designed with batch processing in mind, as it has several flags that are pertinent to this kind of use. This makes the ATI tool much easier to integrate into the tool pipeline for automated renders... very important if you have a lot of models to process.

The last consideration is model size. According to the docs, Melody is limited to models of only 65K polys or less. I'm not sure exactly what the ATI tool is limited to, but after browsing the source it looks like it may be able to handle as many as 2 million. (The practical limit is surely far less however.)

Personally, if you don't need the batch mode features of the ATI tool, I'd recommend trying both on the same model and see which output you prefer. Some of it will depend on your dataset, some of it will depend on what engine you are targeting for the final render.

FWIW, I was previously using MegaPov and the camera_view command... its sort of a hack and doesn't work with everything, but does the job in a pinch!

8th December 2007, 10:31 PM	#3
lisa Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 917	Re: PLUGIN: NMF (ATI Normal Map) Exporter The jury's still out on that one. I've played around with Melody some too, but as of yet I've never been able to get it to do a clean import and export the data without crashing. I have an ATI card at the office, and a Nvidia at home, and it crashes on both. That said, I don't want to be unfair and write it off without really having tried it, as I know a number of people who like Melody. I think it depends on what you want to do. Melody seems to be faster and has a nicer user interface with the built-in preview window. It has much better documentation, and does some things that the ATI tool doesn't such as automatic generation of texture coordinates and LOD generation. It also has specialized support for Unreal Engine, as Unreal uses a different tangent-space bias calculation than other engines. On the flip side, the ATI tool is very robust and has some tricks of its own. For example, you can add a bump map to the high resolution geometry and combine both into your normal map in one pass. In terms of being usable in a production environment, the fact that ATI provides both source code and a command line interface is a significant advantage. The CLI was very clearly designed with batch processing in mind, as it has several flags that are pertinent to this kind of use. This makes the ATI tool much easier to integrate into the tool pipeline for automated renders... very important if you have a lot of models to process. The last consideration is model size. According to the docs, Melody is limited to models of only 65K polys or less. I'm not sure exactly what the ATI tool is limited to, but after browsing the source it looks like it may be able to handle as many as 2 million. (The practical limit is surely far less however.) Personally, if you don't need the batch mode features of the ATI tool, I'd recommend trying both on the same model and see which output you prefer. Some of it will depend on your dataset, some of it will depend on what engine you are targeting for the final render. FWIW, I was previously using MegaPov and the camera_view command... its sort of a hack and doesn't work with everything, but does the job in a pinch!