Baking HP to Low poly ( color map )

wizz

Hi. I would like to ask you how do you bake your High poly geometry to your Low poly geometry. I have task where I have to bake all HP detail into Low poly, I can use only color maps on this low poly. Normaly I bake ao and normal map, I create cavity from this normal using xnormal plugin. And I combine these maps.

But there are some problem where object is complicated. I mean parts of normal maps don't match each other very good because of orientation of object in the space ( see image )



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After converting it to caviti there is a lots of work to fix this in Photoshop. So I would like to see what techniques do you use for baking all details to color map.

Cheers!

Axi5

Is this 3DS Max?

I'm a newbie, I mostly do hard surface modelling so seams are and aren't such an issue, I sometimes paste pixels from one side of the seam to the other and blend it in, or try to create a seamless texture in the first place.

However, I did see a tutorial on youtube for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-maHIFYhb0

It's a really long work around, sorry I'm not much help myself.

wizz

I think this is not the case. I can fix these seams in photoshop with no problem, but they are all over the place sometimes so it takes some time. And for that reason I'm looking for different technique of baking my stuff. And ofcourse I'm making only color map! So these seams are not problem when used as normal map. But I have to use it as a color.

Cheers.

Eric Chadwick

In this case I wouldn't use the normal map to generate the cavity map, because of all the seams in UV space. Instead, use the highpoly model as the source for your cavity/curvature/ambient occlusion. Bake these passes, just as you would bake a normal map.

Xnormal can bake all of these, you just need to adjust the settings a bit. Remember the scale of the model matters a lot for Curvature, and AO. You can adjust the scale in Xnormal.

wizz

Thanks I will try this.

I also was baking in maya shaded map. Its ok but not that sharp as maps generated from xnormal.