Can't seem to bake a simple model

leleuxart

I've baked things down before in Maya and xNormal, but for some reason, I cannot for the life of me get this simple box to bake down. I've tried both programs and a combination of pretty much every option. My low-poly doesn't have overlapping UVs(anymore). I've been using the Maya Envelope method with a higher search depth, and I barely even get one part of the beveled side. Are their any options or something I'm missing? I would have probably just painted the normals with nDo2, but I really need to get a better understanding of baking.

nick2730

show your UV/baked map please. When baking edges like the recessed area you really need to have to at a steeper angle not 90 degrees in order to bake well

leleuxart

Hmm, so with 90 degree angles like this, I'd probably be better off using nDo2 or xNormal's PS plugin and painting it?

This time, the bake actually turned out better than before. I'm actually getting all of the angles.

WarrenM

Well, think about it this way - Normal maps record changes in surface angles. A 90 degree corner offers no information for the normal map to pick up...

Adam L. Gray

Righty, as you can see from this odd diagram here, I am outside the house but my hand is in the window and my foot is in the grapefruit... Sorry, Eddie Izzard reference there.



The black shapes being the hp,orange the LP, blue the cage (envelopes), and green the rays. If you don't use any offset with the cage, or bake without a cage, the rays will go straight down following the normal of the face its casting its rays from, even here though, with the inset edges being parallel with the rays you won't really be able to see it. Basically it's like looking down on it from an orthographic top view.

Adding in a cage with offset, your only making this even worse, as the rays will now be casting from further out and inwards. So had you i.e. a bolt in each corner, it'd have been seen/baked from an angle.

So what you need to do is to bevel that inset and use a as small cage as possible, so the rays will hit it like so:

leleuxart

I can't believe I didn't think about that. Thanks guys! I went through and pulled out the verts and gave the inside faces an angle.

Still getting the black, so I moved my UVs so they don't overlap and removed the high poly UVs just because. Now I'm not even getting anything again.


This is before the UV changes