Student's xNormal Bake Issues

Alea

Hello, student here.

I'm having difficulties with baking my normal map for a school assignment. Been trying several different settings such as for example ray distance, 3d cage, minor edits to the original mesh but the results always end up looking about the same as the picture below.

Having googled for hours at this point I figured you may have a clue as to what the issue could be. Any ideas what the problem could be and/or how to solve?

EDIT: Highpoly made in Mudbox based on the Lowpoly made in Maya.



And here is the normal map.



If you need more information I will provide it as best I can!

Farfarer

I suspect you need to invert the green channel of your normal map (or switch the Y setting of your normal map bake properties in xNormal to be the opposite of what it currently is then rebake it).

You might also look into ensuring your low poly mesh is properly triangulated before exporting.

Shrike

look up smoothing groups / splits (maya) and how they work

your lowpoly has wrong smoothing, and so everything looks strange (this disco ball look)
there might be other things as well, but start with this. And make sure your OBJ/FBX exports smoothing as you made it (check by reimporting same model in maya)

It could also be that additionally some of your quads/triangles have inverted normals. Also bake out a 4k map just to have better resolution , as there are many ugly looking spots as a cause

Torch

Could you upload your model and mudbox file to something like Dropbox and link it here? Wouldn't mind taking a look at it

Bartalon

In Maya, check to see if the 2d Bump Attributes of the bump2d node is set as Tangent Space Normals and not Bump.

Alea

Setting it as Tangent Space Normals instead of Bump in Maya and also baking out a higher resolution map worked wonders.

Thanks for the helpful replies!

May put up end results later