First semi-successful NM bake with some questions

spectre1130

Hey guys and gals, I'm just posting this model I did of a Radio Flyer type wagon. The HP and LP are done but my NMap is looking a little off in parts. Specifically under the main body of wagon, and the rim of the body as well. As you can see from the HP, I didn't model in the little extrusion on the bottom of the body in the LP version. Also the lip of the body is producing some bad shading as well. I'm just happy to have finally done a baked asset in the first place, but I wan to make it better. I'm sure my UV's could prolly use some work as well as needing to bake out an A/O map. Any c/c is surely helpful.

Thanks

Chase

Without looking at your uvs it looks like you managed to space the uv shells out just fine. Congrats on the first bake! Baking's usually a doozy

spectre1130

Thanks chase! It is a doozy. I have tried many times before and always just crash and butn now I'm having the worst time with AO baking. I have tried every method I can find. Scanline, MR, Cage/no cage. I have tweaked the cage a hundred times ,messed with settings, redid the cages, reset my x-forms again-rinse and repeat. I have been working on the AO for hours now. I'm at a loss. Here is my last failed attempt. I don't know what else to do.

Bartalon

I would recommend using xNormal. It's free and from my experience it gets much faster and better results compared to using Maya (can't say the same for Max, but I assume it's about the same difference).

Chase

Can you post the model with the AO applied and the settings you're using for Scanline? I'm figuring out AO maps more and more so maybe I'll have some advice you could try. Don't worry, the little triumphs outweigh the constant trial and error

Deadly Nightshade

Some feedback - I'll try not to sound like a perfectionistic, nagging old hag:

The UV layout could've been optimised by quite a lot actually. Check the picture here:

http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/6889/e00c.jpg

The yellow, orange, magenta and rose shells are identical pairs, and thus should be flipped/mirrored and stacked on top of each other. Why? Unless you are going to have many assets of the same type in a scene, there will never be a camera angle where you see both of these sides (for instance, both outer long sides) at the same time. So instead, you trade off texture diversity (unique shells) for texture detail (less shells = larger map = higher texel density).

Also, the way you've cut up the wheels in four corners appears odd, and I see no reason to do that. Another minor thing to point out is that some of the shells are not straight when there is no reason for them not to be (shells with red circles). When doing UVs you always keep in mind that straightening of shells means that you pay the price in stretching. And stretching is fine as long as it's not noticable (so for instance, with cartoony graphics, you can straighten a whole lot of more shells than if you are working with say high poly objects). In your case, making those shells straight will hardly give you any extra stretching, but you might get a more crisp NM/AO map.

As for baking:
Get xNormal, make a cage, load up your high poly, low poly and cage in the program, run the ray distance calculator for about 15-20s, copy the results and do your AO/NM bake = WIN. There are plenty of tutorials on this in the polycount wiki, and you can always ask here in the forum for help.

spectre1130

@Bartalon, I have X-Normal but I've never really messed with it. I'll probably give it a try. The reason I keep trying to get proficient at RTT in Max is that some companies you might apply to jobs for might not use 3rd party apps. like that. Is X-Normal something that most game companies use on a regular basis?

@Chase- I'll load up my scene with the AO applied and also take some screens for you of my settings for scanline, and the exploded bake so you can see my setup.

@Nightsahde- I hear you on the UV's. The only UV's that I have instanced are the wheels and the wheel caps. I know I could have mirrored those body parts, but as far as the many shells, I was just getting a lot of distortion on that main part especially when I tried to weld all the shells together-it was pretty bad. I'm not the best unwrapper yet for sure. The wheels were really bad until I made those cuts in them:\. Maybe I'll go back and try to just make that body more or less one shell, and mirror the other side a little later after I figure out how to even get a proper bake in Max. Another problem was the handle not even showing up on the AO bake in the bottom left corner. And those "tears" on that swivel piece. What a mess.

I'll get to work on these thing before I have to go to work for the night and hopefully ya'll can help me figure this out some more. Thanks for your time Polycounter's.

:thumbup:

spectre1130

Chase- here is the screenshot of my setup with the exploded scene. The red circled part is not even showing up in the bake. Also, the RTT keeps prompting me for a map slot for the MR AO map , but I deleted that path after I went back to scanline. It's not on the paths menu but I think it is still trying to calculate it.

Chase

Sorry for the really late reply. Computer was overheating and a bunch of other things. I don't see anything different with your settings then how I make mine, honestly looking at your AO on your mesh I can't really see anything bad with with it. Other then it looks like the cage needs to be pushed a little bit in certain areas. Specifically, the areas where the little black spots are on your map. If you could zoom in on these trouble areas you're seeing that'd be cool.