Maya normalmap baking problem

Erafic

Heya, been spending the evening working on some textures and practising through some tutorials and encountered a small problem when working with my normal maps. I did look around but didn't find any other thread about this particular problem.

When baking out my normalmap from a highpoly model in Maya I get these diagonal lines (almost like a cloth thread pattern). Its barely visible as it is but when the normal map comes into use it shows more obviously. I think it could either be that the pictures I get out of Maya are the wrong type (if it should be 16 or 32 bits).

Otherwise I'm just using the wrong method of approach (using a Maya camera, normal map preset on a render layer and then baking out the picture). By the look of it others have had problems with getting good normal maps out of Maya to start with, should I try some third party software instead?

IEatApples

Post some screenshots please and we will be able to help a lot better.

Erafic

Aight, should have included it right away but heres the image

Its mainly meant to be smooth metal and not the diagonal lines that one sees.

haikai

I could be wrong, but shouldn't you be using the Transfer Maps window to bake out your normal maps in Maya and not using Render Layers? I typically render in Xnormal, but in the cases where I do use Maya, I've always used Transfer Maps where you can select your high res source mesh and your low poly target mesh. Baking normal maps has nothing to do with the Maya camera that I know of, and you don't "render" an image like you do in the traditional sense. It's supposed to generate a texture image that uses your UV coordinates.

bugo

what type of format are you using to bake these? DXT? jpg?
Well, filtering for really curved normal maps you might get these if you are baking in 8bits, if you try baking in 16 it might help you but not many engines accept that.

And yeah, please, use transfer maps, nothing else is needed.

Erafic

Thanks for the advice there, its most probably that I should use transfer maps in this case. One can get a little lost when following tutorials that skips fundamental parts

bugo

hehe, there was a method, old one, that you didnt have to use transfer maps, but since Maya 7 we have transfer maps. So it's all good.