Baking artifacts

Cbonez888

Hey all,

Before I begin I wanted to state that i have read over Alex Moody's thread on hard surface baking.

I hope to address my workflow with unwrapping and baking in this thread so I can be more efficient going forward because I seem to bang my head over these things longer than I should be. 

As you can see here in the pics the artifacts i'm talking about. Each method of baking is done with a LP that is all smoothed (no hard edges) and uses a cage. I baked in XM and in Substance Painter. Both Pics with material applied are screengrabs taken from substance painter. This is just one of the many places these artifacts show up, basically every split has these, some of them not as noticeable than the next. Raising the resolution on the bakes does help a bit but I was wondering if my unwrap/island placement could help me more. 

I've always confused myself on which side to break a bevel up on. I know either way I look at it it'll be the same but i was wondering if there was a "right" way of doing it. 

Anyhelp and tips would be great. Cheers,

Cbonez888

Oops, Forgot to add my UVs

Obscura

If I see it right, then you have set up some face weighted normals. In this case, you need to export the normals, and read them when importing into Xnormal/Substance. Showing your normalmap would also help to identify where the issue is coming from.

Cbonez888

Hey thanks Obscura,

Not sure what you mean by "face weighted normals". Also could you elaborate on reading them when importing to substance/Xnormal? If I wasn't clear I baked one normal in Xnormal and the other in Substance. Baking at 4k made them almost invisible but they were faintly there so I'm guessing it could be an issue with my UV's. But here's a look at the maps. I pointed out where the specific pics above meet in the normals

Substance Bake:


XB Bake:

Obscura

FWVN - http://polycount.com/discussion/154664/a-short-explanation-about-custom-vertex-normals-tutorial/p1
If its not you who made it then I guess its the new approach of smoothing in Maya. But still, there are definitely some custom smoothing going on, and you need to export your vertex normals, and import them to your baker. Theoretically you should get perfect bakes with fwvn - it removes the most of the gradients from your normalmap bake, even if you don't use any smoothing split. So your results are very weird...

question - have you tried flipping the green channel?

Cbonez888

Sweet piece dude. I'll address projects differently now knowing this. 

When you say export my vertex normals are you referring to just exporting the low poly? After some research I figured out how to edit Vertex normals in Maya and on the chamfer they were slightly turned out(less than 5deg).

 Couldn't find anything on exporting vertex normals, I'm assuming it's just the low poly info. I'll try a bake in the morning, I'm also gonna try separating my islands a little more to give it more padding. 

I haven't tried flipping the green channel, I figured baking in substance would give me the proper NM to be read by it's shader, but i'll give it a try. 

huffer

As far as I know, exporting obj and fbx includes by default vertex normals, so if you'd export from Maya (with Angle and Area weighted), you'd get the same result in 3dsmax, and in UE4 (unless you choose to calculate normals) or Marmoset. It's hard to say what the problem is, have you triangulated the mesh before baking?

Cbonez888

Thanks gents,

Still banging my head over this. I've tried the custom vertex normals method, as well as making more space between my islands and still getting the same results. I always triangulate when exporting for bakes, thanks for the suggestion Huffer.

Any other suggestions? I'm just spinning my wheels here

Here are the results:
Custom Vertex Normals


And "more padded" island: