Question about baking normal from multiple highpoly
interpolator
I got a question I hope someone can help me with.
When baking a tangent normal map from multiple highpoly meshes, I get errors in areas were the highpoly meshes intersect and the lowpoly has a UV seam and edge split.
Might be worth mentioning that the highpoly meshes are supposed to look like separate objects in real (e.g. bottle and cap), therefore smoothing out the area where they connect is not what I'm looking for in that case.
Tested in xNormal and Blender using a cage for the baking.
To demonstrate this I quickly put together the image below.
The shape and amount of the error varies depending on the meshed of course, the example here is quite uniform.
What I think to know so far is that to reduce the error I can only supersampling/anti-aliasing in xNormal, Blender doesn't support that therefore I would have to render a higher resolution and downsample later, a step I would like to avoid.
Separating (explosing) the mesh completely eliminates the issue, but can be troublesome, especially if the low poly needs to be cut to pieces, something that might have to be completely repeated if there are changes to the model.
My question, is there any technique to get rid of the artifacts without exploding the mesh?
In case not, would be great to know how you deal with them usually.
Help is really appreciated and if this topic was already explained please point me in that direction.
When baking a tangent normal map from multiple highpoly meshes, I get errors in areas were the highpoly meshes intersect and the lowpoly has a UV seam and edge split.
Might be worth mentioning that the highpoly meshes are supposed to look like separate objects in real (e.g. bottle and cap), therefore smoothing out the area where they connect is not what I'm looking for in that case.
Tested in xNormal and Blender using a cage for the baking.
To demonstrate this I quickly put together the image below.
The shape and amount of the error varies depending on the meshed of course, the example here is quite uniform.
What I think to know so far is that to reduce the error I can only supersampling/anti-aliasing in xNormal, Blender doesn't support that therefore I would have to render a higher resolution and downsample later, a step I would like to avoid.
Separating (explosing) the mesh completely eliminates the issue, but can be troublesome, especially if the low poly needs to be cut to pieces, something that might have to be completely repeated if there are changes to the model.
My question, is there any technique to get rid of the artifacts without exploding the mesh?
In case not, would be great to know how you deal with them usually.
Help is really appreciated and if this topic was already explained please point me in that direction.
Replies
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147227
@jfitch
Not sure if I understood "angles toward the camera" correctly, but I added a chamfer to that inside edge and that work very well.
Just changing the silhouette a tiny bit, but should be visible if small enough. Adds a bit of gradient to the normal surface which shares the smoothing, but that's ok.
Only real downside is the additional geometry needed, if budget is limited.
@dzibarik
That worked as well.
Unfortunately I tend to forget if I do this kind of changes to the cage, therefore I try to avoid manual editing of cages.
@SuperFranky
Making them two separated low poly parts is what I meant by exploding.
I probably will start combining additional geometry and spliting the parts.