Wrinkled Smoothing causing bad normal map

Dominic Sewell

Hey guys its probably a quick fix but whenever I smooth this gas tank, maya spits out this strange topology along the bottom of the tank this is appearing in my normal map once I bake it 

Could anyone inform me how to fix the strange "wrinkling" when smoothing

Low Poly (with normal map)


High Poly


Thanks in Advance

AtticusMars

This is very typical of what happens when you cap your cylinders with a trangle fan (might be a quad pole in your case?)

There might be better solutions but mine would be to just not use a fan. If you don't want to mess with the topology this looks like a shape that would be pretty easy to create in a few seconds by deforming a quad sphere.

Dominic Sewell

@AtticusMars Thats the first ive ever heard of that so thank you this seems to do the job is this the correct sort of topology you were advising?

Stenofo

Hello Virtualinsomnia.
What Atticusmars actually meant is you should rebuild that detail from scratch:
-Make a cube
-Apply two sub-d iterations to the cube
-Freeze/apply the sub-d modifier (or how it is called in your 3d app). You must get a polygonal object
Now you have a sphere which is all quads, omogeneous in structures and has no poles: a good starting point.
-Delete half of the sphere and use the rest to rebuild your object.
Please note that the spherified cube is not a perfect sphere, you'll have to use a spherify/relax vertices command. I discovered this techniques while doing helmets, regular object structure helps a ton!

Dominic Sewell

Thank you both for the advice its very much appreciated i think ive gotten the idea now