Normal maps on round corners?

mobkon

Hey -

So I have my high poly mesh that has some pretty round corners. I beveled my low poly mesh to account for these round corners. At first I baked out my normal map and had some pretty nasty lines along some of the UV seams where the low poly mesh was beveled. To fix this, I just cut all the UV seams and moved them a few pixels apart (I read this is what I'm supposed to do). This fixed the problem and the normal bake now looks great.

BUT my issue now is my UV layout is now in a bunch of disconnected pieces rather than one solid piece. If I re-connect the pieces, the nasty seams come back.

Am I missing something here? I can't seem to find a tutorial that deals with this, so I haven't been able to come up with the answer myself.

Using Maya 2012
Thanks!

EarthQuake

Right, that is the drawback with using hard edges, which necessitate splitting your uv islands apart. There is no way around it.

I set up my uvs and hard edges sort of all at once. I set up my uv so I can use a quick script to convert uv borders to hard edges. If you think about both of these tasks at the same time, you won't run into any surprises in terms of needing to split apart uvs you otherwise don't want to.

You can use additional bevels in place of hard edges in certain areas as well, this will allow you to use fewer uv islands.

mobkon

EarthQuake wrote: »

Right, that is the drawback with using hard edges, which necessitate splitting your uv islands apart. There is no way around it.

I set up my uvs and hard edges sort of all at once. I set up my uv so I can use a quick script to convert uv borders to hard edges. If you think about both of these tasks at the same time, you won't run into any surprises in terms of needing to split apart uvs you otherwise don't want to.

You can use additional bevels in place of hard edges in certain areas as well, this will allow you to use fewer uv islands.

Gotcha. Thanks for the reply. Any tips for making my diffuse maps now with UVs that are split apart? Even though its only a few pixels, seems like extra work to get the texture to flow properly.

EarthQuake

Automation (creating masks from ao, cavity, object space normals, etc) is probably the easiest way. You can do this sort of stuff manually in PS, but programs like Quixel's Suite or Substance work on the same basic premise

3d painting is another option, either to do the actual texture work, or just to fix up seams at the end/.