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Old 8th December 2007, 07:57 AM   #1
lisa
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Default PLUGIN: NMF (ATI Normal Map) Exporter

"NMF Exporter". Download it here:
http://www.independentdeveloper.com/...l-map-exporter

This plug-in exports your AC3D model into NMF format, so that you can use ATI's NormalMapper utility to generate normal maps and ambient occlusion maps from your high-resolution model and apply them to a low-resolution mesh for use in video games. This lets your low poly models look like they are high poly.

If you don't know what normal maps are, you can read a really great tutorial here:
http://www.bencloward.com/resources_tutorials.shtml

You can download the NormalMapper utility from ATI here:
http://ati.amd.com/developer/tools.html
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Old 8th December 2007, 05:20 PM   #2
luuckyy
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Default Re: PLUGIN: NMF (ATI Normal Map) Exporter

Thanks lisa !
I'm now able to try and use the ATI tools (thanksfully there's a GUI provided) with that exporter.
I also have Melody from Nvidia.
Did you try it already ? If yes which one do you think is the "best" : NormalMapper from ATI or Melody ?
I do have an Nvidia Geforce FX5200 (yep an old card ) if that makes any difference (does it ?) ?
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Old 8th December 2007, 10:31 PM   #3
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Default 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!
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Old 9th December 2007, 06:02 AM   #4
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Default Re: PLUGIN: NMF (ATI Normal Map) Exporter

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisa View Post
I'd recommend trying both on the same model and see which output you prefer.
That's what I'm going to do.
It's cool to be able to use them both, to have the choice.
Thanks !
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