Baking artifacts, tried everything...

putka

Hey guys, asking for help on forums is my last option. I haven't eaten anything and my vision is blurry, been trying to solve this all day.

So I've done some sculpting on a spear in zbrush, brought it back into maya and made a low poly version of it. Standard workflow I guess. Then I tried baking different maps in xNormal and of course, there had to be issues.

First I thought it was just normal maps causing problems, but then I tried occlusion as well and had artifacts on the exact same spots.

Basically, everything comes out looking great, EXCEPT for the 6 small spikes surrounding the main spear head. Check out my epic attached explanation pic.

I checked for topological errors, tried adding more resolution, tried also baking in topogun and in maya itself - always the same issue. I don't see any mesh issues with the high poly version either. Is this just a problematic shape for baking or what? :poly122:

Thanks yall

Adij

explode the mesh

joncatapia

What I would do is separate the low poly mesh; maybe the handle with those spikes, then the blade. Bake the handle first, then bake the blade after, and just combine the two normal textures into 1. I hope this helps.. I had a similar problem and I found baking separated meshes worked for me

.Wiki

You dont need to bake every piece seperatle, just move the lowpoly and the corresponding highpoly meshes away from each other. So that they dont intersect anymore. This is called "exploding" like mentioned in post #2.
Those artifacts result from intersecting geometry. Your cage hits a surface which dont belongs to the corresponding highpoly.

In max theres a cool option to bake by material ids. So you can bake normalmaps without exploding the mesh. But for ao baking you would need to do that.

cupsster

or bake in xNormal and use blockers

AlecMoody

that doesn't look like an issue with parts being too close- have you tried a custom cage and if so, what does it look like?