i think we may need some more information - can you show us the low and high poly ?
sure, do you need them as an .obj or are screenshots fine ?
@ KonArtist,
It turned out my cage was completely wrong indeed. I changed it but it did give me the artifact clean bake I was hoping for
I tried several bakes:
- using exported normals vs average normals
- change the cage size
- change the renderer (cuda render wont work, gives an error which I will make a screenshot off next time)
- change the AO Spread Angle / Rays
- Turn on "Allow 100% occlusion"
All without real success which makes me believe there might be something wrong with my low poly. As you can see the bake has become a bit better but still carries allot of artifacts:
Here is a viewport screen capture from the LP + HP inside of 3DSMax:
The cage you used did you make sure non of the high poly was outside of it? In Xnormal you can probably just use their cage editor and do a simple cage extrusion as they call it.
The cage you used did you make sure non of the high poly was outside of it? In Xnormal you can probably just use their cage editor and do a simple cage extrusion as they call it.
yes, the cage fully encompassed the high and low poly. Looking at my 3DSMax viewport screenshot the idea pops up that maybe my low poly should be smaller tan my high poly (?) (most of the problem areas coincide with the areas that overlap in the HP/LP).
Having the low poly and high poly overlap doesn't matter, its more important that the low poly is built in a way that follows the shape and silhouette closely enough to get good results.
It could be something weird going on with your highpoly, maybe some geometry got folded over its self and causing the normals to do something weird.
Also try this, go to xnormal, load up your meshes, and hit the box that says show cage. Post a screenshot here of what it looks like. That might help us.
might the reason I have been getting these bad bakes be because my low poly mesh (could) have some weird extrusions which does not follow the high poly ?
I obviously checked the low poly bake inside of 3DSMax and while it looked good inside there might be some small errors. The annoying thing is that my HP is 8+- million polygons so it becomes hard to manually move verts around comfortably. Should I decimate the HP first ?
Your cage does not fully encompass your high poly. Gotta fix that first.
Second of all, uncheck both boxes that say "ignore backface hits".
Finally, uncheck the box that says "limit ray distance".
That should give you a generally higher quality bake, and SHOULD get rid of your errors.
A question regarding Xnormal/Cages in general..:
- Does it matter if part of the cages "intersect" with each other ?
the reason I am asking this is because if I push my cage any further it will start intersecting with each other pretty badly.
A question regarding Xnormal/Cages in general..:
- Does it matter if part of the cages "intersect" with each other ?
the reason I am asking this is because if I push my cage any further it will start intersecting with each other pretty badly.
Remember, you can move individual verts on your cage. You don't have to change the whole thing all at the same time.
No, it doesn't matter if the cage intersects with itself. But if the cage starts going through your high poly, that's a problem.
oke I tried everything, even went back to my Low Poly to retopo it but I still get these errors, actually it seems a bit worse now xD
I tried uploading my .obj file but it seems 990 mb in size (wth).
*Any way to check for "errors" in my Zbrush HP mesh inside Zbrush itself?*
*Also, should I try and decimate the mesh to about 2 million instead of the 6mill it is now ?*
when I tried reloading my HP .obj in Zbrush I got the popup: "The imported mesh contains 17 unused 3D Points :O Is there a way to check for these types of artifacts manually inside of a program?
Decimated the mesh to about 500k poly's and made a new bake, still artifacts
*EDIT* It just strikes me that my HP mesh has some topo problems. Sadly I cannot use Dynamesh to retopo my mesh since it destroys the detail. Atleast this is what I thought... I am now thinking that I can dynamesh the mesh with "blur" off and than decimate it again. Will try it
*EDIT2*
So dynameshing/decimation did not work for the topology since the decimation master does a shitty job at that. Any other program that I can use to evenly distributre the polygons?
K, first I checked out your low poly. You had a couple places where your UVs were overlapping each other, simply because the geometry was so extreme and you didn't cut enough islands. So I fixed that.
For baking, I made a cage in xnormal. I pretty much just extruded the whole thing until it covered the high poly completely. There was one problem area that I adjusted manually.
I baked out an ambient occlusion, and it looked fine. There was maybe one problem area, but given how jacked up the geometry is for your high poly, I am not that surprised.
Here's the low poly with a couple textures on it. MisterSande_Stalactite (View in 3D)
You are going to run into issues any time you have a high poly model with geometry as jacked up as this, especially if your low poly model is simply a decimated version.
thank you so much Dirigible and you didn't cut enough islands
I was afraid this might be the problem. How much is "'too much" with an asset like this ? I am afraid of seems when I make more than 4-5 islands.
Could you make a screenshot of your UVIslands ? thanks again man.
high poly model with geometry as jacked up as this what if I am going for a "jagged" up look ? I push and pull geometry in Zbrush quite allot just to create this jagged effect.
Cut as many UV islands as you need, to prevent overlap and massive stretching. I didn't really change much in your UVs, just took the top left island and cut a chunk out of it, then cleaned up a couple other problem areas with pushing and pulling uvs.
I'm not really saying "don't do what you did" for the highpoly, since I can't argue that the result looks pretty good. Just be prepared to have issues. Frankly, it worked better than I thought it would.
Replies
yes I have sadly. Could it be due that the low poly is not encompassing the high poly enough ?
sure, do you need them as an .obj or are screenshots fine ?
@ KonArtist,
It turned out my cage was completely wrong indeed. I changed it but it did give me the artifact clean bake I was hoping for
I tried several bakes:
- using exported normals vs average normals
- change the cage size
- change the renderer (cuda render wont work, gives an error which I will make a screenshot off next time)
- change the AO Spread Angle / Rays
- Turn on "Allow 100% occlusion"
All without real success which makes me believe there might be something wrong with my low poly. As you can see the bake has become a bit better but still carries allot of artifacts:
Here is a viewport screen capture from the LP + HP inside of 3DSMax:
It could be something weird going on with your highpoly, maybe some geometry got folded over its self and causing the normals to do something weird.
Also try this, go to xnormal, load up your meshes, and hit the box that says show cage. Post a screenshot here of what it looks like. That might help us.
I obviously checked the low poly bake inside of 3DSMax and while it looked good inside there might be some small errors. The annoying thing is that my HP is 8+- million polygons so it becomes hard to manually move verts around comfortably. Should I decimate the HP first ?
Second of all, uncheck both boxes that say "ignore backface hits".
Finally, uncheck the box that says "limit ray distance".
That should give you a generally higher quality bake, and SHOULD get rid of your errors.
A question regarding Xnormal/Cages in general..:
- Does it matter if part of the cages "intersect" with each other ?
the reason I am asking this is because if I push my cage any further it will start intersecting with each other pretty badly.
Remember, you can move individual verts on your cage. You don't have to change the whole thing all at the same time.
No, it doesn't matter if the cage intersects with itself. But if the cage starts going through your high poly, that's a problem.
I tried uploading my .obj file but it seems 990 mb in size (wth).
*Any way to check for "errors" in my Zbrush HP mesh inside Zbrush itself?*
*Also, should I try and decimate the mesh to about 2 million instead of the 6mill it is now ?*
Decimated the mesh to about 500k poly's and made a new bake, still artifacts
Here are the new meshes (included a 200k HP)
http://www.2shared.com/file/zynTw4gf/meshes.html
*EDIT*
It just strikes me that my HP mesh has some topo problems. Sadly I cannot use Dynamesh to retopo my mesh since it destroys the detail. Atleast this is what I thought... I am now thinking that I can dynamesh the mesh with "blur" off and than decimate it again. Will try it
*EDIT2*
So dynameshing/decimation did not work for the topology since the decimation master does a shitty job at that. Any other program that I can use to evenly distributre the polygons?
there you go.
For baking, I made a cage in xnormal. I pretty much just extruded the whole thing until it covered the high poly completely. There was one problem area that I adjusted manually.
I baked out an ambient occlusion, and it looked fine. There was maybe one problem area, but given how jacked up the geometry is for your high poly, I am not that surprised.
Here's the low poly with a couple textures on it.
MisterSande_Stalactite (View in 3D)
You are going to run into issues any time you have a high poly model with geometry as jacked up as this, especially if your low poly model is simply a decimated version.
and you didn't cut enough islands
I was afraid this might be the problem. How much is "'too much" with an asset like this ? I am afraid of seems when I make more than 4-5 islands.
Could you make a screenshot of your UVIslands ? thanks again man.
high poly model with geometry as jacked up as this what if I am going for a "jagged" up look ? I push and pull geometry in Zbrush quite allot just to create this jagged effect.
Cut as many UV islands as you need, to prevent overlap and massive stretching. I didn't really change much in your UVs, just took the top left island and cut a chunk out of it, then cleaned up a couple other problem areas with pushing and pulling uvs.
I'm not really saying "don't do what you did" for the highpoly, since I can't argue that the result looks pretty good. Just be prepared to have issues. Frankly, it worked better than I thought it would.