Normal map gradient

Selaznog

Hey guys, I'm sure this has been answered before (no luck in search though) but I have a question about normal map gradients.

You see, in order to get a good bake from a hi to low poly object in maya, I need to soften the normals on my low poly. But for some reason when I bake from my hi poly, the soft edges from my low poly are baked on my normal map (I think this is whats happening).




It's a simple crate, and the sides should be flat. The final thing looks fine in maya, however I'm not sure I want to show this terrible normal map in my breakdown image.

Thanks!

Kurt Russell Fan Club

That's not the soft edges from my low poly baked on my normal map.

That's a result of the surface normal being interpolated (blended) over the surface of each triangle. There's nothing really wrong with this so long as it looks good in-game, but if you change the topology of your low then you have the best chance of reducing it.

It might be possible to make your normal map look like this through changing your triangulation on your lowpoly (before you do your bake) or by adjusting your normals by hand and using explicit normals.

Or you can remove the effect by adding basically support loops to get rid of the long diagonals, but that's not a great idea.

what's your lowpoly look like? You might be able to clean it up.

pinkbox

try harden edges on your UV border maybe? then rebake

bugo

may we have a picture of the lowpoly? Sometimes instead of having triangles stretching like that, i would just continue the flow so it doesnt have such a distortion. Also because u may want to capture cavity maps from it. Also, I'm unsure by not looking at your model, but it looks like these holes are going inside? If it is, do you really need mesh on those? Maybe nmap would do the work.

passerby

gotta show us the LP with wires, than we can give better suggestions

SaferDan

Yeah if its a simple crate I assume you have 90 degrees angles on your edges, to fix it what I do is harden the edge and split the uvs along the hardened edges Or you can chamfer the edges up to you!

Selaznog

Thanks for the quick response guys!
Kurt Russel & Bugo, if I change the triangulation of the crate, and have loops, that will increase the polycount significantly. Actually, I could do that for a proper bake, and then retopo after baking...myes. This could work.


Here's a pic of the low poly crate. (wireframe at the bottom)

Neox

if your engine is snyched with mayas normal baker this is the best result you can get, if its not you will have to harden your edges and split the uvs accordingly OR add support geometry to harden the shading.

Selaznog

Seriously guys, don't know what I would do without you. Tried baking my gun, and the result is beautiful. The "put seams where there are hard edges trick" worked like a charm. This takes off a lot of stress




(PS, that's not the whole gun obviously :P)