Normal map problem

BonaB · Nov 2016

Hey guys, I started to study 3D 6 months ago and a week from now I decided to dive into the hardsurface on 3dsmax.

I'm having strange artifacts on my normal map bake on substance painter and I wanted to know what I did wrong so I can fix it. I will post some pictures of the low and high poly with the UV and the terrible results I got.

Bake Settings

High Poly in 3dsmax

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/21/hls8m0vvedcs.png

Low Poly in 3dsmax

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/pk/4tyef313dck5.png

Artifacts

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/8j/j0utwrisdviy.png

The one below is the strangest of all for me, because I have no clue from where this rectangle could

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/4h/qi514ov83gmz.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/6q/ssratduqmh3u.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/2b/aensztoph6xy.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/9y/9i3k354cxemc.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/n7/k4i50xp9lbvo.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/53/y6uo6k84c5ga.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/qe/1ekazv5vnvam.png

In advance, thanks for the help !

Bartalon · Nov 2016

Triangulating your low poly, using a cage, and setting your UV islands to their own smoothing group will get you pretty far. If you have any overlapping / mirrored UV islands, offset all but one outside of the 0-1 space.

All those ngons are probably causing you a lot of problems. When you leave them as ngons, you're letting the rendering software decide how to triangulate your mesh, and it won't necessarily triangulate the same way across all programs.

You can also refer to this thread for general theory and best practices when it comes to baking normals: http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts/p1

BonaB · Nov 2016

Bartalon said:

Triangulating your low poly, using a cage, and setting your UV islands to their own smoothing group will get you pretty far. If you have any overlapping / mirrored UV islands, offset all but one outside of the 0-1 space.

All those ngons are probably causing you a lot of problems. When you leave them as ngons, you're letting the rendering software decide how to triangulate your mesh, and it won't necessarily triangulate the same way across all programs.

You can also refer to this thread for general theory and best practices when it comes to baking normals: http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts/p1

Hey Thanks for the answer, but I just fixed it by sending to maya and deleting history and freezing transformations ^^

Normal map problem

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