Normal map woes - how the hell do I fix these normals

skurmedel

Hi. I have an old assignment in my backlog where I need to do a low-poly potted plant (how terribly exciting.)

I thought I had a good grasp on normal mapping but evidently not as this bloody pot is fucking with my brain.

I modeled the HP & LP in modo and tried to bake there. The results where not good, so I thought this might be to modo baking being a bit wonky sometimes. But nope.

So I loaded up xNormal and I can't get it to work there either, with or without cage.

Here's my LP (aren't you in awe now?):


Black wires are the HP. Here is the HP smooth shaded:



And the lamentable result I got from xNormal. Highlighted is the troublesome top part of the pot. I understand why the middle part is trying to smooth itself round, but the rest puzzles me:


I know my vertex normals are afoul here, but even so no combination of values gives me a good result. Tried making the "hard edges" hard and so forth.

All this leads me to believe I might need to bevel some edges, but I need guidance as I don't really know where. My own attempts sucked.

OGL view in modo:

poopipe

you need more loops generally. look at the normal smoothing on the low poly , that is what it bases normal projection on when you bake and should give you an idea of where to add supporting geometry

skurmedel

Ok thanks. It got better but it seems like I need more edges on the cylinder itself... I've already hit the polygon budget though with my leaves.

Sigh, it looks better without normal maps on the pot.

Ace-Angel

Break them up by UV groups. Basically, anything that looks like it has a steep angle, make it have it's own 'strip' in the UV's, broken from everything else.

Then, make that strip have it's own smoothing/hardness/softness group, and bake it from there.

BTW, I have no idea what Tangents Modo uses, so I have no idea if what I said will help in the bakes look better.