xNormal Software

Joe Cotter

Has anyone used xNormal? If so, what are your thoughts.

Visioneer

Personally, I love the program, especially with baking the Normal (what it was meant for, lol) and AO maps (admittedly, I use the AO maps to cheat when creating textures to give them a slightly more "layered" look which adds to texture realism.) It's been a while since I updated, but when I used it, it was free. I don't know if that's the case, still, but if it is, there is absolutely no harm in downloading it and taking it for a spin yourself. It does take quite some time to bake a complex normal map, but there are harder/worse ways to go about doing it. It also doesn't handle super high polys very well, either, which is a shame, considering all my baking comes from ZBrush. When I was using it, I had to decimate the high res sculpts I made to get it to work in xNormal, which is really unfortunate as there was a slight loss in detail for me (from over decimation, just to be on the safe, non-crashing side.)

Joe Cotter

Thanks Visioneer for the feedback. It's interesting what you mentioned about it's problems with high poly count. The tutorial it was mentioned in (don't have link atm...) retopoed before sending to xNormal. And yes, it's still free. One thing I was wondering is how it compares to baking built into most 3D packages now. Where it might be advantageous or not so much so.