Normalmap baking problem on a pipe segment

Xazas

I have little experience in baking normal maps and this piece is giving me a big headache.
How should I layout the UVs and how should I approach baking such an object? Below are my highpoly, my lowpoly and my really bad result so far. I would really love to get some help here. I used Blender so far for baking my maps and recently tried xNormal but sadly with the same result.

neilberard

Haha, I see you have discovered cylinders and how much they suck for baking normal maps.
They is a whole breakdown of how to fix this problem. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154

.Wiki

First try to align your UV shells and edges to horizontal and vertical axes. This will give you cleaner results.

This waviness can be cleaned in any image manipulation programm, just use a smudge tool to clean them up a bit.

Xazas

Thank you both for the advice and the hind to the very helpful thread. With another UV unwrap and the right alignment of the UV shells I got a much better result.

BARDLER

.Wiki wrote: »

This waviness can be cleaned in any image manipulation programm, just use a smudge tool to clean them up a bit.

NEVER do this. It breaks your normal map accuracy and you should never have a reason to do it if you bake it properly in the first place.

passerby

@.wiki normalmaps are more than just simple image data, they still have to mathmatcally work, which if smudged like that the vectors will no longer add up to 1, and they will be inaccurate.

never do this, there are always better ways.

to the op add more geo to the LP to reduce the waveyness, build a proper cage, azd you will also want to add uvspilts at sharp angles in your mesh.

neilberard

I agree, don't use smudge. Yuck that is a crappy way to go about it and develops bad work habits. You can kill those support edgeloops and use more geometry for the roundness of your lowpoly pipe! It looks like it is 16 sides, I would go with 20 or 24 sides. Um.. at least on the outer cylinder to give a rounder edge.

EarthQuake

neilberard wrote: »

I agree, don't use smudge. Yuck that is a crappy way to go about it and develops bad work habits. You can kill those support edgeloops and use more geometry for the roundness of your lowpoly pipe! It looks like it is 16 sides, I would go with 20 or 24 sides. Um.. at least on the outer cylinder to give a rounder edge.

Yep, if you kill one of those 2 edge loops on the inner section, and then add more edges/roundness to the actual shape of the pipe you'll get less waviness and the asset will look better, as it will be rounder. Normal maps can't fake roundness unfortunately.

Also, don't spend too much time worrying about what the normal map looks like in 2d, always view it in 3d to check for issues. Something that looks off in 2d may actually look better in 3d, slight waviness can look better from certain angles for instance.