Normal Map - ugly spots

Eison

I made a low-poly dude in Maya and unwrapped it in Roadkill, then I exported it to Zbrush and made the high-poly.
Then I wanted to try baking a normal map in Xnormal and that's where I got the problem (I think).

So first, the vertical line trough my model, can this be because the Normal Map is mirrored?

And the second, the weird ugly spots under his chin, can this be because the cage in Xnormal?

Ace-Angel

What did you use to bake the Normals?

Flip the Y/Green channel and/or X/Red maybe?

Also, did you mirror and weld the mesh BEFORE baking the Normal Map?

zakhar2

Since everything seems to be mirrored have you moved half of the UV shells out of the 0-1 space?

It also looks like your smoothing groups might not be set up right.

Eison

Ace-Angel wrote:

What did you use to bake the Normals?

Flip the Y/Green channel and/or X/Red maybe?

Also, did you mirror and weld the mesh BEFORE baking the Normal Map?

I used Xnormal, one of the first times I used it so maybe I made a beginner mistake somewhere...

In Maya I mirrored the mesh, then merged the vertices and triangulated it for Xnormal.

This is what the Normal Maps look like with the channels flipped (btw, their all +Z, the -Z is just a mistake :P )

zakhar2 wrote:

Since everything seems to be mirrored have you moved half of the UV shells out of the 0-1 space?

It also looks like your smoothing groups might not be set up right.

At first I thought that was the problem as well, but it didn't help much

And the smoothing groups is a different problem, one which I never had before... Most of the time I soften all edges and then harden a few but they didn't want to become hard this time (... that last part sounds bad... but I really don't know how to phrase that better >.> )




Also when I looked at the cage again in Xnormal I noticed that there are no tangents pointing outward from those face where the Normal Maps goes ugly. I also noticed it's more grey-ish near that part just now...



And just to be sure a screenshot from my baking options...

zakhar2

If you cant seem to harden edges try going into Normals -> Unlock normals and then harden all the UV borders.

Eison

Thanks man, that actually fixed the vertical line, just had to harden that edge
The ugly spots kinda fixed itself after I restarted my laptop... But just to be sure I made another Normal Map with Zbrush and combined that one onto the Xnormal one with Photoshop, so hopefully I won't see that again