Mental mill shader not displaying correctly xsi

Rigging
1

hi,

I am having an issue with normal mapping in xsi 7 using mental mill.

Here is how I am producing the shader.

  1. open mental mill and produce the following shader tree:

  2. drag and drop the shader from windows explorer onto the sphere mesh in xsi.

  3. create a point light in xsi and connect the global positional parameters of the light to the shaders light x , y , z

  4. connected the intensity of the point light to the shader lights intensity.

  5. set all the vertex attributes to the sphere meshes texture coordinates.

It is definitely the normal map that is creating it as I created a shader tree in mental mill with only the normal map. It looks fine in mental mill just xsi has issues.

the more intense the normal map the more dots/arifacts appear. I have produced a bump shader using opengl program in xsi and it was fine.

Tech specs:

nvidia Quadro FX 4600
cg toolkit installed as is fx composer.
xsi 7

cheers,

Sue.

2

It could be a normalization issue, which could be your shader tree (I don’t see an image, should there be one?).

More likely it is a driver issue, especially dubious as you are using a workstation card- try the shader on a different machine.

Also, is the shader HLSL, CGFX, or GLSL? And check different rendering ‘modes’ in XSI (not sure if they have software/OGL/DX modes to choose from). Finally, you should also be able to open it in FXComposer, and see what happens.

But as I said, it is most likely a driver issue, so try that first.

3

hi rob,

thanks for getting back to me.

I have attached the images this time. :-d

the shader is a CGFX and it appears fine in fxcomposer just xsi has the issues.

Not sure about the drivers as of yet as I need to get the admin guys to sort this out.

In xsi tried different display modes (opengl, directx 9 and directx 10), definitley opengl viewer though. Tried the different opengl options (shadows on and off etc).

Tried different shader graphs to connect the normal maps up in mental mill but the one displayed is how they do it in the manual. Not saying I am not wrong as that is always a possibility :-d

I think you are right in that it is a driver issue and I will get back to you on that shortly.

Probably worth noting I have tried some other cgfx shaders with normal maps and they don’t have the artifact issue in xsi. These are the shaders that come with fx composer.

many thanks for your time again.

kind regards,

Sue.

4

hey,

well I sorted it out finally,

the issue was ashamedly simple. I had set both the u and v of the normal Uv information to a vertex map. I should have set it to just one and set the other to a texture projection and then it is fine. Weird thing is I tried it before and it did not make a difference. Maybe a fluke, but hey at least it is working now.

Many thanks for your time and help.

Sue.