Question is simple, is it possible to view Normal maps and/or specular maps on XSI viewport?

I’m migrating from 3Dsmax, and on 3DsMax is very easy to see those real-time, what about XSI? Is it possible or not?

It’s possible and easy, you pretty much just need to switch the viewport over to a realtime view such as directx, and give the object a real-time shader that supports normal / specular maps.

There should be quite a few .fx files floating around the net, or you could use a free tool such as FX Composer/ Mental Mill AE (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html) to quickly create your own shader (I created two: one that uses the color/specular/normal map, and one that just uses a normal map with a gray color map to let me see the result of the normal map better).

Edit: Here’s a poor quality video (1.3Mb) quickly showing how I apply FX shaders with normal maps.
http://cryrid.com/images/temp/XSI/videos/normalmap_test.avi
(.obj came from game-artist.net)

Many thanks, that really is a big help.

My problem is, I can’t find any shader to use.
Any chance if you could share that shader you use with us? Or at least, tell us where we could get more of those shaders, is there any website where we can download them?

Thank you very much for your help.

http://cryrid.com/images/temp/XSI/shaders/

There are two quick ones I quickly created with Mental Mill (it’s very easy to create realtime shaders with, and is node-based similar to XSI and the Unreal Engine’s Material Editor), and there’s bound to be plenty of better .fx shaders floating around that actually had some care and time put into.

Be sure to open the shader’s properties and adjust the light around, lower their intensity, etc.

Thank you so very much man! You saved my day!

This is handy, thanks Cryrid.

It d be nice to have a button in xsi, similar to Maya’s high quality rendering.

So you could turn realtime shader on and off, without all those steps. (as I cant write my own shaders)

No problem.

I don’t think the current set-up in XSI is too bad. All it involves is adding tangets (which I think are only needed if the shader is using a normal map), applying the realtime shader you want, and then which images that shader should use. It takes less than a minute to set up (which I think is no different than applying a material elsewhere), and you only have to do it once and you’re done (and switching back and forth becomes instant).

I can’t get this to work. when i view in directx 9 my object disappears. i can click and drag select the empty area and select the object tho.

it also says “DirectX 9 View. Available texture mem:442Mb”

???

Is the .fx file loading enough for you to be able to switch images and edit its lights?

If it is.. perhaps you should see if even a simple directx shader will even display correctly. If that doesn’t work, I probably wouldn’t be of any use (unless you don’t mind sharing the scene+maps).

Do you have a sample scene i can try out? with maps etc

http://cryrid.com/images/temp/XSI/directx_test.zip
You might have to open the render tree and reload the shader/images to point them towards their new path, since I just threw them into the same folder afterwards.