Baking errors galore. PLEASE HELP ME.

pixelpatron

What the hell is up with these? There basic blocks. Nothing is working.:poly127:

Ugh this baking shit drives me nuts.

What am I doing wrong?

linky

ZacD

You should split at 90 degree angles and make them hard edges.

Post the normal maps.

The only part that really has issues is the sides, it looks like the UV's are some how messed up, but they look fine in the editor, weird.

pixelpatron

split at 90? meaning it should be it's own shell?

.Wiki

On one of your UV clusters there are 2 edges really close to each other running across one of those side elements. Please check if you have some overlapping in these areas on all of your clusters.

cmtanko

Yeah, if you split very plane UV separately, you could get rid of those gradient in the normal map as well

Der Hollander

I have no idea what's going on with those side faces, in your web 3D view it almost looks as if it's planar projected UV's? Super goofy. Also, read up on the sticky threads "You're making me hard" and "Understanding averaged normals and ray projections" I guarantee you they will change your life.

pixelpatron

I'll read up, but seems like it doesn't stick for some reason, so I've gotten this fixed for better or worse yet I still don't get how to fix issues like the one below. How can I get the area in red looking like the area in green?

here is the model in 3-d for reference as well.

Mark Dygert

You might be baking with different settings than what the 3D viewer is expecting. By that I mean there are a lot of different ways to bake and interpret normal maps and not every baker does it the same way and not every viewer is expecting the same results.

One of the most common issues when baking in Maya is an inverted green channel. A lot of applications go by the 3dsmax way of baking and Maya by default is exactly the same but inverts the green channel. I think this might have something to do with the discrepancy between Z up in max being Y up in Maya, but I'm not sure.

Typically there are settings in your baker or viewer/engine that you can change to correct this, or you can try going into photoshop and invert the green channel yourself.

Here are some past posts from people who dealt with similar issues:
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50064
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90503
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/907112-Inverted-Normal-Map-In-UDK
https://www.google.com/search?q=normal+maps+baked+in+maya+invert+green&oq=normal+maps+baked+in+maya+invert+green&aqs=chrome..69i57.7011j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Also you should bake with a lot more padding, if a UV seam falls between two pixels the dead space will bleed into your texture. If you bake with padding it will make sure that the UV always lands on a correctly colored pixel. This is especially true if you ever down size your texture sheets, which happens in game engines and 3D viewers quite often.

Polycount Wiki about edge padding:
http://wiki.polycount.net/EdgePadding?action=show&redirect=Edge+Padding