Crappy looking normals

samnwck

So I'm still fairly new at baking normals, and so far my bakes are turning out like real garbage, just little artifacts everywhere. I've tried to adjusting the cage, adjusting render settings and I'm not really too sure what is causing my maps to look like this. I've read several topics on here and all the suggestions don't seem to help, so either I'm not quite understanding or it's something else. I've tried baking in both Xnormals, and Substance Painter and both have given the same results. So far I feel like this is shown right here at the bottom of the "A" column: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/499159/mnt_07.jpg
That's from this topic: http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts

this is kinda what I'm getting right now: http://i.imgur.com/noIPX5F.jpg

huffer

Maybe post the meshes? It's hard to say what could be wrong.

Bartalon

Looks like you might have hard smoothing splits on the inside of your UV islands, or you have UVs split but no separation in UV space.  Make sure your UV islands are each assigned to a single smoothing group.  Also be sure to triangulate your model before baking or it can cause issues in your bake; although it's usually in the form of dark diamond gradient shapes inside some polygons.

ZacD

Well, the bevels on your highpoly are too tight to bake well, and those artifacts you see might be from using a 8 bit texture, try baking a larger 16 bit normal map, use TIFF if you are using xNormal. 

samnwck

Bartalon said:

Looks like you might have hard smoothing splits on the inside of your UV islands, or you have UVs split but no separation in UV space.  Make sure your UV islands are each assigned to a single smoothing group.  Also be sure to triangulate your model before baking or it can cause issues in your bake; although it's usually in the form of dark diamond gradient shapes inside some polygons.

So giving a smoothing group to each island helped to a point, but there is still much weirdness throughout the bakes. Would breaking up each hard edge on it's own UV island help out at all?

samnwck

Soooo after (way too much) trial and error, I found it was a combination of things. The edge loops on my high poly model were way too tight, I redid my uvs so that every time the model went over 45 degrees angle change I made a new uv island which seemed to help, and also I put proper smoothing groups per UV island. Thanks everyone.