Trouble Baking Maps

seithr

Hey, I'm making my first game character at the moment but I'm having a lot of trouble baking the maps out of xNormal. A lot of the edges seem to be extremely ugly and jagged for some reason and I'm not too sure what I should do to go about fixing this. Any help would be hugely appreciated.

Heres what I mean:

Thrivius

Don't be afraid of adding more Geo to the collar area, especially with character art! Also those black lines could be because of your unwrapping and smoothing groups so make sure if you have a smoothing group split that you also have a Uv shell split!

EDIT: Spelling

seithr

Thanks for the advice, I may need to remake some of the low poly geo. Im not too sure what you mean be smoothing groups and UVs though.. would you mind going into a bit more detail? Thanks

Thrivius

Did you model this in Max? Because i'm not sure of the Maya alternative to smoothing groups

Bartalon

The topological texture in your render leads me to think your normal map is being rendered as a basic bump map instead of a tangent-space normal map.

seithr

@ Thrivius, Im working in maya so you may be talking about smoothing the edges of the normals?

@Bartalon, you were absolutely right on the wrong map being used for bump, I changed it to tangent in vray and it produced a MUCH better result. However I am still seeing some jagginess on some of the edges (see pictures) what would you guys recommend to get rid of these? More polygons on the basemesh? I am also noticing some odd blackness around the sleeves which I am unsure about :S

csprance

It looks to me like you're using a distance based method of baking your normal maps.
You will get much cleaner results if you use a cage based method.

Pretty much everywhere you have a UV split you need to create a hard edge (General rule of thumb) this will make sure your edges get the correct amount of padding and the shading looks correct.

That may also help clean up your edges. Also remember that pixels are squares so when you're planning your UVS out try to keep everything that needs a nice sharp edge in a straight line. (I'm not saying it has to be straight everywhere but if it makes sense and it can be rotated so you can reduce the pixelation do it!)