Faceting normals on simple bake

ClusterOne

I was trying to bake a normal map for some simple modular counter top pieces that I could put together in UDK. For whatever reason I get terrible faceting in the normals where it should be smooth and I don't understand why. Its a ridiculously simple object so I can't imagine whats causing it. I tried triangulating my hp and lp, baking it in maya, 3dsmax and xnormal, all of them return the same, faceted results. Do i need to add more edges to my mesh or is there something else that I'm not doing or overlooking? Thanks.

Hopefully this hastily prepared image gives you a rough idea of my problem:

CheeseOnToast

Have you actually tried the normal map on your model? Looking at the 2d map is useless on its own. All that matters is how it looks on the model.

The faceting is the normal map compensating for hidden triangles. Long, thin tris like this can cause some artefacts due to the normal map trying to create a smooth gradient over an area that only has a few pixels dedicated to it in the texture.

Jeza87

You seem to have N-Gons on the side of both the high and low meshes. I would redo them and try again with better topology.

ClusterOne

I finally fixed my normal problem so I figured I should share my solution just in case anyone else runs into it. First, here's what my problem looked like:



You can see there are little facets running across the mesh. What worked for me is separating UVs by smoothing groups and tweaking the living hell out of the shape of the low poly. I assumed because this was a simple task I could be really careless with it--oh boy was I wrong. I leaned that a clean bake is so dependent on a good low poly, if you aren't getting good results--keep tweaking it. I actually didn't have to add any geometry, just adjusted the shape.

@CheeseOnToast while that didn't work for me, I will definitely remember it and use it on my bakes from now on. Thanks!

@Jeza87 Ah sorry, bad camera angle--it makes it looks like there are ngons there but there aren't actually. Xnormal doesn't accept ngons so you can't actually bake a mesh that isn't quad/tri.

Sorry for the crap thread, I probably should have experimented a lot more before making a thread.