Weird normal map artefacts

SuperFranky

Doing some test bakes for fun and encountered this weird issue. For some reason I get "breaking" artefacts in my normal map bakes when I bake Zbrush's highpoly into a simple low poly plane. For some reason, I couldn't recreate this issue with a different highpoly mesh. I bake in Xnormal and save in TGA.





If anyone knows how to fix it, please tell me

AdvisableRobin

What program are you using to display the map in?

GlowingPotato

does the artifacts appear at the normal map itself ?

SuperFranky

AdvisableRobin, Marmoset 2.05

GlowingPotato,
yep

Bartalon

Occasionally I will import one of ZBrush's OBJs into Maya and it comes in as several individual mesh objects with borders that appear to follow the edges of one of it's previous lower subdivisions.

All the bold lines represent borders between other parts of the object.



Border edges would naturally cause inconsistencies between vertex normals even when smoothed. If your high poly mesh is light enough, it could show through in your bake, but this is just a long shot.

I've never personally had your issue when baking normals and I'm not even sure the picture above is a problem that occurs outside of Maya. Might be something worth looking at though.

As a side note you might want to readjust your low poly so there are vertices directly over the center of each bolt. It should help reduce distorting perfectly circular details.

AirRun

Along with what Bartalon is saying make sure the low and high poly's normals are smoothed out (averaged) That will definitely cause artifacts like that.

SuperFranky

Interesting, decimating the high poly mesh by any percent completely fixed the issue. I wonder why... But there's definitely was something wrong with the mesh, I guess.

CheeseOnToast

Simple to fix with export settings from Zbrush. Turn off this button :



In fact, also turn off "Txr" and "Mrg" unless you specifically want to export your highpoly with texture and UVs. It makes the export faster and the obj file lighter.

SuperFranky

CheeseOnToast wrote: »

Simple to fix with export settings from Zbrush. Turn off this button :



In fact, also turn off "Txr" and "Mrg" unless you specifically want to export your highpoly with texture and UVs. It makes the export faster and the obj file lighter.

Great, I'll try it next time I have problems with meshes. Thanks a lot:thumbup: