Question on baking Normals. (BIG NOOB HERE)

manilamerc

I have a few questions on baking normals. What are some guidelines I should follow when baking normals??

Here I have a low poly followed by a high poly. I want to bake the the high poly detail onto the low. I have baked a normal map in 3ds max before but I indeed had some issues that I had to paint over. What I want is to get it right the first time or at least paint minimal things.





Now thing is when I align the high poly over the low as you can see here there is the low poly going over the high. (which I pointed out in blue)
It would seem I need more geometry in the low poly model. Is this correct?

Or am I totally missing out on something??

OVERALL... I just want a smooth looking model like the high poly but have it actually a low poly model. Do you guys reto indtead? Share your thoughts please...

I come from a character modelling background for baking normals and now I'm doing environments. So simple things like this I would like to know. Thanks

Bartalon

You're correct. The closer your LP follows the topology of the HP the better your normal bakes will be, especially on curved corner pieces like that.

Meshes always lose a little bit of volume when subdividing, most noticeably along rounded surfaces and corners with a lot of space between edge loops. You might want to bump up the number of edges you are using to build your HP if you are expecting to also use that mesh as your low poly.

Zepic

This will help you out too. When baking hard edges you can get those nasty black lines along the corners.
Also, what are you using to bake; XNormal?

JedTheKrampus

What's your target engine? How you should do your bakes depends heavily on what your target is.

tigerheart

At this point I would try with a few more polygone, but if you are short on ressources, it is still possible to have good result. Try using a cage, set your low poly inside, the hipoly, duplicate the low poly and set it outside, that will be your cage...
To be honest, up until now, i always have to do a few retake in photoshop to have some good normal map

manilamerc

@Zepic I was using Xnormal but I started using 3dsmax.

@JedTheKrampus my engine im using is udk