Seams on hard surface normals Maya

Cbonez888

Hey ya'll

I remember seeing a great tutorial on what may cause seems in a normal map, the tutorial had 3 cubes all unwrapped different ways and explaining what some had seams and others didn't. I searched high and low but couldn't find it. Anywho, from what I remember from it, if you wanted to avoid seams on your edges you should make each uv unique. If this is correct can someone please help me with my issue, I'm getting seams on every edge, you can see my UV's are unique (edges are split anywhere close to 45 deg+) and have enough padding inbetween them. If someone can shed light as to why that would be great. I did find other explanations telling me to make my UV's unique, (again, which i did) but I seem to have an issue. I realize bevelling could also help this issue, but i'd also like to know the solution without going that route

Cheers,

Neox

where do you bake?

Serial Lens

Your problem is likely that you aren't using either a cage or a baker with averaged ray projection, and your high poly edges are inside of your low poly edges. See 17:00 in this video: http://youtu.be/kGszEIT4Kww

Cbonez888

Thanks for the replays.

@ Neox, I'm using mental Ray renderer in Maya 15. I'm trying to use Turtle as a test, but it's oddly starnge that in Maya LT (which I am not using) Turtle has a set of features that are in the version of Maya 15 i'm using BUT the bake button is no where to be found. I've looked up and down, changed the renders to Turtle but it only renders the current frame. It's really frustrating.

@ Serial Lens, Thanks for the advice. I am using a cage (enevelopes in Maya) and the I've moved the low poly edges away from the high poly) they were sitting right on each other. But my bake came out the same. Seams on every hard edge

ZippZopp

under the advanced options of the transfer maps dialog box, what is your 'Match Using' set to? if it is set to surface normals you can get seams, I generally always use Geometry Normals and my bakes come out fine

Cbonez888

After playing around some more i have found a solution to using turtle baking.... But, my results have not differed

Cbonez888

Hey ZippZopp

Thanks dude, I tried that and it got me much better results. Much appreciated. Through these tests I've realized that surface normals get me great results non edged surfaces but crappy seams on the edges. Geo Normals gets me better edge surfaces but wavy articles over planar polygons. Would love to find a nice middle ground where I don't have to add more geo (bevels or loop edges)

ZippZopp

yeah the surface normals projection method just looks at the face normals so you get non skewed results with surface details, however, the seams and edges get projection gaps.