XNormal Bake Experimentation

Endfinity Jon

Heya friends.

I updated my blog with a post about bake settings in XNormal. I certainly don't know it all but I pushed and pulled most of the knobs and posted images from each of my bakes. Check it out! If you've got any questions, let me know, and if I've missed something or made a mistake, let me know too so I can update it.

Happy Baking!

http://jcricreate.blogspot.com/

Love always,
Jon

nyx702

Nice article. I like the photo choices

Thanks for putting this together.

J0NNYquid

Great article, having never baked out maps with XN I wanted to try it out on my next project, this will be very helpful. Thanks.

cptSwing

Good summary of xN's AO settings, cheers!

CheeseOnToast

Great article. Don't suppose you fancy trying to get something useful out of the curvature map option? I've tinkered for ages with it without much success.

Weirdboy

I read that whole thing in Guy Fieri's voice....

Eric Chadwick

I found Curvature depends heavily on the scale of my meshes. I adjust the Scale first, setting the highpoly and lowpoly to something like 10. Or if my meshes are large I go smaller like .1.

I like Two Colors, so it's just convex/concave with flat being black, makes it easier for me to see and use.

A higher Bias seems to push the colors more to Convex and less to Concave.

Search Distance makes the gradients wider, less sharp and thin.

Just a lot of tweaking, watching it change while it renders.

Eric Chadwick

Just wanted to say, great article. It's always good to investigate each setting in a methodical way, see what does what.

You're using the Ray Distance to bake with, but do you have any hard edges on your model? AKA Smoothing Groups in Max. If you do, and you're not using a cage in Xnormal, then your maps are going to have gaps in them. A picture http://wiki.polycount.net/NormalMap#Working_with_Cages

Also curious about your UV layout. If you have overlapping shells, you're probably going to get bake errors. It's always a good idea to more the overlaps 1 unit over in UV space. Just leave one of the shells inside the 0-1 UV box. Another pic http://wiki.polycount.net/NormalMap#UV_Coordinates

Loved seeing about the Bounce meshes! Very cool, going to have to try this. Thanks again.

Endfinity Jon

Thanks guys! Glad it's getting read and of some use, it may or may not have taken a long while to write

@ Weirdboy - that's weird. And awesome. But seriously though, is that dude real?

@ Eric - Good points, and points I didn't touch on very much. Concerning the hard edges, well, there weren't a ton of them. The only hard edges were at 90 degree junctions so I didn't really have any issues with them there. I'll have to look into the cage a bit more though because I know what issue you're talking about and it's pesky.

Concerning the stacked UV's - I didn't bake anything stacked. Essentially, I baked 1 of those shared pieces at a time. So, the fanblade was baked separately, and once the bake completed, I duplicated the blade around the mesh. So, they stack now, but not during the bake. Same goes with the other parts of the mesh, the circular blade housing, the corner turns, and the bottom trim piece. The things that you saw UV mapped with the checker where what I baked and what was grey were things that I would eventually replace with baked items:



And yeah, bounce meshes are great! I used two of them for the bake, the main one was what you see above in grey. The reason I used this is because without it, the gaps will fade off into white which would be unrealistic on the final model. Once I put the filler mesh in, the lighting would smooth over the mesh as if it was bouncing light off of the full thing resulting in soft contact shadows that I would get if I baked the whole thing together.

The other bounce mesh I highly recommend. If you're baking a pillar that will always be on the ground, throw in a plane at the base of it so it can get a little contact shadow info in the bake. I did this for the AC Unit by placing a plane behind it because I knew it would always be against a wall. Doing this means my screen space AO won't have to work as hard for me because contact shadows will already be in the bake. One thing to note though, is that you can move that bounce mesh around if your bake is too dark.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I'm still curious about some of the other XNormal settings but I figured nailing an AO/Normal pass is the biggest part of the maps foundation.

Love,
Jon

Eric Chadwick

In my experience, hard edges on 90 degree corners are where the bake errors are the worst, when baking without a cage. A normal map will show those errors the most.

Baking stacked things in separate bakes is OK as long as you're not overlapping UVs in the same contiguous mesh. Like if you bake only the outside left face of the AC housing, and want to reuse the UVs for the outer right face. You should bake the whole housing as a single mesh, so you get the correct tangents. Which means you need to avoid overlaps.

Whatever, if you're not seeing errors, then no worries!

Endfinity Jon

Well, by golly!

There's a ton of stuff I still need to learn so I'll have to research a bit more. I painted out imperfections in the map, so that helped a little, but I can understand where I need to be mindful of tangents.

Good thing this is such a simple asset! In my newer bakes I'll keep these things in mind and will post results if there's beneficial info.

Thanks for the tips!