Normal map high specular artefacts

yaschan

Im having this strange issue when baking from high poly to low poly with xNormal. Nothing special here, getting predictable results, except this!

High specular on flat areas reveal these.. What could this be? Im not seeing anything strange in normal map.

LMP

How many bits per channel is your normal image? 8? 16? TGA or TIFF? The artifacts you see are because there is not enough information to smoothly display the almost flat areas perfectly.

yaschan

Thank you!

I tried this and I was able to improve result by baking to 16bit TIFF and convert to 8bit in Photoshop. I send screen shot. Its much better but with some noise.

For some reason, loading up 16bit file to Marmoset gives me same result.

Would there be any way to get rid of the information in almost flat areas and present them flat instead?

EarthQuake

There is a bug with TB2 which fails to load true 16bit per channel color data from tiffs, resave it as a PSD and it should work correctly.

You can also reduce this problem by reducing the gradiation in your normal map. The easiest way to do this is to use hard edges along your uv boarders and re-bake.

But as you've found out, simply resampling from 16bit to 8bit in photoshop helps, as photoshop does some nice dithering, while Maya, and I think Xnormal tend to give you stair-stepping artifacts like this. Max on the other hand adds some dithering similar to the file saved out of photosop.

yaschan

Thank you for great answer. Good to know that PSDs work in TB2

Do you guys always bake 16 bit normal maps when using xNormal?

EarthQuake

yaschan wrote: »

Thank you for great answer. Good to know that PSDs work in TB2

Do you guys always bake 16 bit normal maps when using xNormal?

Yes, I think if you change the image format to tiff or .hdr or .exr it will bake 16 bit