Help with baking process

Xane

Hi guys, I was just wondering if anybody can help me with my baking issues. I'm new to this so I can't say I'm getting this too easily. So far most of my problems revolve around objects with hard edges, organic stuff I don't seem to have as much of a problem with.

So far I've tried baking with xnormal, but since that wasn't giving me the desired results I tried baking out with ZBrush as well. I'm not too sure if I should be using softened or averaged normals etc for my hard edge stuff. Can anyone clear that up? I'll post some screens of my model in Both ZBrush and Maya for you to take a look at along with my UV layout. If anybody can point me in the direction of a tutorial which gives a definitive run through of the process then that too would be appreciated.

I'm also aware that my mesh is probably a little overcomplex in some areas and a little too simple in others. I know I haven't consolidated a number of meshes into a more singular mesh but at this stage I'm trying just to learn about the baking process a bit more with this character. Thanks in advance for any help guys, here are the screens. Oh ye should probs mention that these are the bakes from Zbrush.

JoakimMellergard

Basically, you want hard edges and separated UVs in these places that is hard surface. this will get rid of the ugly gradients that appear and it will also give you the "crispness" that you speak of.
The stretched areas are happening because the difference between the high and low poly is too big. I wouldn't sculpt the areas like the "spikes" in front. Instead add it with software like xnormal plugin for PS.
I prefer baking with Maya - Transfer Maps. Dont ever use zbrush for baking normals. Some of your artifacts can be fixed by moving some of the cage's vertices around. The rule is to never have your cage inside your low poly mesh but also to have as close as possible. Good luck!

Xane

Thanks for your response. I actually became aware of the fact that you have to split the UV shell along the hard edges. I tested this with just the helmet but I still couldn't get the desired result. I then noticed that at some stage I've lost my crease information, likely because objs can't actually hold this information and I've lost the creases when importing again from UV layout. Can you confirm if I am supposed to export the low poly in smooth preview mode "3" (or does this not matter)? Also because exporting as an obj I will therefore lose the creases when the low poly is in xnormal so does this adversely affect the bake? Should I therefore use Maya to bake objects with crease information?
Also I'm not sure that what you were saying about the models being too far apart can be correct. Low poly is lowest sub div level version of the high poly so same model and scale surely? Thanks again.

JoakimMellergard

I guess by "crease information" you mean hard edges?
I don't think smooth preview matters but I've never tried exporting with it on. Just in case - dont.
Try baking with Maya unless Maya can't handle the high poly. You get really great result using Maya.

No I might be wrong. What I meant was that if the low poly is "too lowpoly" in comparison to your high poly you might get weird result in som places and areas like the ones you want to be straight but aren't might happen.

RockSPb

I try to use Maya to bake some difficult normal maps. Autodesk dosen't change bake tool since I stat use maya 8.1. Maya have a problem with raytracing. So I recoomend to try 3ds Max or Xnormal. These tools give the best and predictable result.

Xane

Thanks, I think I'll have to get into the Max way of doing things, as it seems it's the more common program of choice when it comes to this sort of work. Also by "crease info" I was talking about the way you can define hard edges in smooth preview mode. This also allows you to take your mesh into a program such as Zbrush and subdivide whilst maintaining the hard edges.
Maya could't handle the high poly. What I was doing was just exporting high from Zbrush and because I had the low open in Maya I was exporting the low from there.