Avoiding "broken" edges in bakes?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone,
I wasn't sure what it's called.
The problem I'm referring to is what happens when you bake, for example, a smoothed cylinder onto a low-poly version of that cylinder.
The baking info when put on the low poly mesh shows how the edges of the low poly object are breaking the smooth curve of the cylinder.
I can't really show an example because I don't know what this is called.
Basically, if for example you wanted to bake your high poly telescope onto a low poly one, and you managed to create a good silhouette that looks nicely smoothed. You wouldn't want your textures (normals/AO/diffuse/whatever) to giveaway the polycount within the shape. You want the textures to be curved nicely on the "jagged" mesh, instead of looking like they're laying flat on a broken surface.
I once tried to bake my smooth object onto itself, and getting that bake on my low poly. It understandably got me a weird result where the texture would "warp" between edges, but opposite from what it should have been.
I will try to create an example tomorrow and post it here... but until then, if anyone recognizes my question (this thing probably has a lot of history in game art discussion) - I'd love an answer.
TL;DR
How do you bake a nicely smooth cylinder (normals, AO) onto a low poly cylinder while keeping the "curvyness" of the highpoly cylinder on the broken low-poly surface.
I wasn't sure what it's called.
The problem I'm referring to is what happens when you bake, for example, a smoothed cylinder onto a low-poly version of that cylinder.
The baking info when put on the low poly mesh shows how the edges of the low poly object are breaking the smooth curve of the cylinder.
I can't really show an example because I don't know what this is called.
Basically, if for example you wanted to bake your high poly telescope onto a low poly one, and you managed to create a good silhouette that looks nicely smoothed. You wouldn't want your textures (normals/AO/diffuse/whatever) to giveaway the polycount within the shape. You want the textures to be curved nicely on the "jagged" mesh, instead of looking like they're laying flat on a broken surface.
I once tried to bake my smooth object onto itself, and getting that bake on my low poly. It understandably got me a weird result where the texture would "warp" between edges, but opposite from what it should have been.
I will try to create an example tomorrow and post it here... but until then, if anyone recognizes my question (this thing probably has a lot of history in game art discussion) - I'd love an answer.
TL;DR
How do you bake a nicely smooth cylinder (normals, AO) onto a low poly cylinder while keeping the "curvyness" of the highpoly cylinder on the broken low-poly surface.
Replies
I think
What application are you using to bake?
What application are you using to view the results? Viewport Shaders? Engine?
What do the problems look like?
What does the high and low poly look like?
What does the UV layout look like?
What settings are you using?
What have you tried to fix it?
Are you unrealistically expecting a normal map to smooth out a silhouette of an object?
That is exactly it. It seems that the solution is just using higher polygon counts?
I was hoping there's some kind of a baking solution to this, or am I missing something?
Yes though, you get waviness because your low poly isn't matching close enough to your high poly. An 8 sided cylinder will never come close to matching the roundness of a nicely smoothed high poly cylinder no matter what baking tricks you try to do.