efficient model? Baking Normals

SelwynPhillips

Hi there, as with most people I've struggled with baking normals despite reading as much info on the process as much as possible.

Here's my problem:

I'm making a set of sliding doors. At first the geometry was very basic and I felt some simple bevels would make it a little more interesting. I made a high and low poly version of this and baked it in Xnormal but I was getting harsh lines where the corners met. To fix this I started separating those section in the UV editor which gave me cleaner results as expected. My question is, although I'm getting cleaner results by doing this if I separate all the sections would this model be efficient? I'm not sure it is...
Should I have just stuck with the simpler version?

Simpler version

Baked in Xnormal to get bevelled edges. the rest done in Ndo2.


Bevelled version

Some parts have been split to create a cleaner bake on the edges/corners. Ignore bad UV mapping. I'll tidy it up when I know the best way to unwrap it.



Results so far:


Thanks

Pedro Amorim

I'll be honest, if it was me, I would probably uv the front of that door into one uv planar shell. Not really necessary to split face by face like you did. Makes it a pain to texture.

SelwynPhillips

Yes exactly what I thought. That's what I did the first time around but there were artifacts along most of the edges. Splitting the pieces up fixes it but as you said it's gonna gonna be pain to texture afterwards and as far as I'm aware this increases the vertex count too. Maybe I'm being to anal about it. I'll go back to what I previously made and post up the results of it. Thanks for your input

Nosslak

selwyn369 wrote: »

Yes exactly what I thought. That's what I did the first time around but there were artifacts along most of the edges. Splitting the pieces up fixes it but as you said it's gonna gonna be pain to texture afterwards and as far as I'm aware this increases the vertex count too. Maybe I'm being to anal about it. I'll go back to what I previously made and post up the results of it. Thanks for your input

It sounds like you tried baking it as one piece while keeping the smoothing splits. You can't do that, you'll have to remove all the smoothing splits if you want to bake it with a single UV island.

If you use smoothing splits you always need a UV-split as well if you don't want edge artifacts.

Baking it as one piece can cause problems with very sharp angles (>70 degrees) but it doesn't look like you've got many of those so you should be good to go.

SelwynPhillips

Thanks for commenting

So I have reverted back to what I originally had. For some reason the bakes look a little better than the first time I had my UVs set out this way but there are still seams despite there being no >70degree angles. However these seams are only really noticeable from up close so should I really worry about this?

Below is an image of what my UVs look like now. I suppose that I could've stitched the other bits together given that there aren't any >70 degree angles there. I could be wrong however...

The edges of the UV islands have been hardened


And the results.

EarthQuake

Do you have hard edges on the lowpoly? If so, that would cause these seams.

You either need to set all of your edges to soft, or split every hard edge off to a separate uv element.

SelwynPhillips

EarthQuake wrote: »

Do you have hard edges on the lowpoly? If so, that would cause these seams.

You either need to set all of your edges to soft, or split every hard edge off to a separate uv element.

Yes I do but only on the edges of my UV islands. The rest of the edges are soft. I'll give it a go

Thanks

SelwynPhillips

Ok so I softened all the edges which did get rid of the edge seams but I got strong gradients in the normal map. Then it occurred to me that the first time around I had hard edges along the outside of my UV islands but the inside edges weren't softened they were just the default averaged normals.

To get rid of the gradients I have made the edges of the UV islands hard again and the inside edges are definitely softened. This improved the gradient issue a fair bit but there are still a few problem areas.

UVs: Highlighted edges are hardened

SelwynPhillips

To fix some of the gradient issues I used some support loops around the edge of the face of the door and looks reasonable in Marmoset aside from some minor gradients.


UVs with the support loops


UDK doesn't like it so much