Normals with grid lines for polys?

inanimate

I'm having trouble with grid lines appearing on the polys of my low poly normal maps, as shown in the attachment. I'm baking a tangent-space map in zbrush, but I can't seem to get rid of these.

I'm sure this is a super basic problem, but I couldn't find any pages here dealing with it or any info on the normals wiki. If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it!

Muzzoid

You need to make sure that your normals are smoothed not set to faceted before baking.

inanimate

How can I smooth the normals in zbrush? I have SMT set before subdividing.

battlecow

in the normal map baking options in the tools

BARDLER

You shouldn't bake normals in zbrush anyway because you have no control, you cant use a cage, and nobody knows what its tanget basis actually is. Use xNormal instead.

inanimate

thanks battlecrow, that did it!

I'm on a mac, so are there any good options besides xnormal?

BARDLER

inanimate wrote: »

thanks battlecrow, that did it!

I'm on a mac, so are there any good options besides xnormal?

Max or Maya then, they both support cage projection baking. If it works on Mac try handplane so you have more control over your tangent basis.

Farfarer

Modo will work on Mac, too.

inanimate

So I tried xNormal and Handplane via Parallels. It's looking better but as you can see in the attachments there is one seam in the normals (on the uv seam) that I can't seem to get rid of. Any ideas?