Test Bake 3ds Max Textools

Firefly

Hello everyone. I'm having issues understanding what's going on here.

I've seen and read everything about textools and uv splits, and smoothing. I'm just not getting it. So I decided to do a test bake on a simple object.

Here's what I got. Please see below.









As you can see the problem here.

I followed the rules of unwrapping the box ~> going into textools menu ~> hitting smoothing groups from uv shells and so on.

BTW, I used xnormal.

Why are the sides looking like this?

Bek

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap#Baking

See the "Working with cages" section.

Firefly

Thank you for the link but I've read that before, and I still don't have the understanding on why this happens? It's like it's separating each polygon face?

Dave Jr

Then I suggest you re-read; its your edges. There too sharp and cannot be projected properly on a 90 degree angle. Try chamfering them.

Quack!

Dave Jr wrote: »

Then I suggest you re-read; its your edges. There too sharp and cannot be projected properly on a 90 degree angle. Try chamfering them.

^^^ This is incorrect. Your high poly edge width won't cause seams in your low poly.

Using a cage will fix your problem as Bek stated.

You are doing this by NOT using a cage:
Those yellow and blue asterisks represent your seam lines.


By using an averaged cage you would be doing this, fixing the problem:

You will want to use a cage any time you bake normals, with a few exceptions, like baking to a flat plane.

While I am at it, it is also smart to use at least 8px of padding between your uv islands so that your mipmaps don't bleed horribly together.