Hi and thanks for reading. When I turn on maya's high quality render to see my normal maps my geometry has this falt black grabage over it...It's kinda like when you have two identical objects in the same exat space each with different colors and parts of one model show through. The thing is that where there isn't the black grabage the normal map shows fine. I am using a Radeon x1900 and in the specs it says it has normal map ability
It may be some problem with your model, try "cleanup" and maybe moving some stuff by hand, maybe even "separate".
is the uv map in many shards?
The UV maps and topology are clean. I did a test with a nurbs sphere primitive and got the same results.