Normal Baking Issue

narticus

Hi all,

Having an issue with a table top that is nearly flat. I gave the high poly a little bit of an angle, just to make the normal map a little more interesting, but it seems to have backfired.

Below you can see the high poly, followed by the low poly, then the table in Marmoset. At the end is the normal map baked from xNormal.

See the weird artifacts in Marmoset? You can also faintly see it in the normal map. I realize this is something I could clean up in Photoshop, but I'm perplexed at why it's happening at all.

Any help with resolving this would be appreciated, thanks!

Eric Chadwick

Looks like the highpoly and lowpoly are both being baked together as targets. Are you using mentalray as your renderer? I don't use mr for bakes, but I recall there being a need to manually hide the lowpoly faces. That could be it.

narticus

Baking it in xNormal, and I have the high and low poly OBJs designated correctly. I will double check though and make sure.

huffer

You could try baking and saving outputs as 16-bit (or higher, not exactly sure), looks like artifacts from combination of low bit-depth and very small gradients.

narticus

huffer wrote: »

You could try baking and saving outputs as 16-bit (or higher, not exactly sure), looks like artifacts from combination of low bit-depth and very small gradients.

Hey, thanks! I baked it as a TIF from xNormal, which automatically saves as 16bit. Looks like those artifacts are gone now.

Is it customary to bake normals to TIF format?

Eric Chadwick

Yes. You should be baking and editing in 16bit, then convert down to 8bit for use in a game engine.

narticus

Thanks!

narticus

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Yes. You should be baking and editing in 16bit, then convert down to 8bit for use in a game engine.

Ok, so it looks fine in Marmoset when I have a 16bit TIFF normal map applied, with Scale & Bias un-checked. Then, when I convert it down to an 8bit TIFF, I need to turn Scale & Bias back on to make it look right, and the artifacts/distortion is showing up again. Any idea what's going on there?

Jeza87

Save it from 16 bit TIFF to a 8 Bit .TGA

frankrs

Jeza87 wrote: »

Save it from 16 bit TIFF to a 8 Bit .TGA

Thanks, I could hug you right now. been trying to sort that for hours:)

EarthQuake

Just a crit here on this asset, you've got a lot of uneeded edgeloops that are not helping the silhouette of your model, you can remove almost all of those redundant edge loops up top, and many of the ones on the bottom feet as well.

I would then go back and add more sides to the top to round out the silhouette as that will be a much better use of geometry.

narticus

EarthQuake wrote: »

Just a crit here on this asset, you've got a lot of uneeded edgeloops that are not helping the silhouette of your model, you can remove almost all of those redundant edge loops up top, and many of the ones on the bottom feet as well.

I would then go back and add more sides to the top to round out the silhouette as that will be a much better use of geometry.

Thanks.

This project has taken a backseat for the time being. Working on some other things in the meantime, and definitely learning a lot more about preserving silhouettes and optimizing flat surfaces, which I did neither of with this asset. I will probably recreate the low poly altogether when I return to it.