[xNormal] Baked AO maps look low-res

dreamparacite

Hello! I am new to baking ambient occlusion maps and instead of relying on long bakes in Unity I want to be able to do individual AO maps for each model that I can control. This lead me to xNormal and it seems to work well except that the ambient occlusion bakes end up looking like they're at a low-resolution, even though they're baked at 2048 with additional rays.


I was testing baking an AO map for the shelves within the freezer here.

Here is the resulting 2048 map from the shelves (which are UVed correctly). The shelves do have the faces deleted which are covered by the frame and other pieces and so I thought maybe that was the case but...

Here's an AO map from an air unit I made and this was to confirm the issue. So as you can see no matter if the UVs are good or not or the settings are reverted to default I can't seem to get a quality AO map.

Does anyone have sufficient xNormal experience to help diagnose this? I've tried using a plane and a half of a sphere and also a cage to get a nice AO map but it seems something else is causing this. Also finally here's a picture of the map applied to the shelf, not very good looking at the moment:


I am using Cinema 4D R15 and xNormal on Windows 8.1 for eventual use in Unity

huffer

How many rays are you using? For this large surfaces go to 512 or more, save 16-bit tga's and add a surface blur in photoshop to clean up any artifacts.

ElleKitty

TIFF is also an excellent format to save to, if you're going to work on in in Photoshop. It can save your entire workflow, everything that PSD can.

dreamparacite

Thanks for the responses!
Here is a screenshot of my current settings:


Clarification: I'm actually only testing this on the end of the shelving, so it's not huge in size on its own.

Here is the bake with 512 rays exported as a TIFF and multiplied onto a lighter version of the surface, looks nicer in the texture view but you can still see horizontal and vertical artifacts and it looks dreadful in editor. I could blur it out in photoshop but that seems to be avoiding the problem.

EarthQuake

Bump rays even higher, say 1024 or so. Try turning on jitter too, not sure if that will help though.

huffer

There might be something wrong with the color depth, image compression or import settings in the editor, from xnormal's end all you can do is double the rays and render with openrl for extra speed.

AdvisableRobin

Not sure how relevant this tutorial still is since it uses an older version of xNormal, but it might be worth a peak. Here

The last image looks a lot like Unity's image compression. If performance isn't super tight you could try turning compression off on the texture file.

dreamparacite

Hey guys, back again. Thanks for the tip EarthQuake, I thought that might be a ridiculous number to even try but it seems to be working! I even added jitter for fun, it looks like it added some noise but otherwise turned out much better:




There's a couple other issues like the fronts of the shelves but I think once I disable jitter and tweak the cage I'm using I may be ok. This is all be previewed in Cinema 4D R15 by the way. It's eventually going to be used in Unity but anything you see on the model besides that second image in my first post is Cinema.

Also AdvisableRobin, I was using that tutorial but I noticed the xNormal interface was different than mine so I wasn't able to tweak the settings he was mentioning to improve quality.

And also thanks huffer if it continues to give me that look when I enter Unity I'll definitely look into those. Thank you for all the helpful replies everyone!

dreamparacite

Update: Just did a bake with jitter turned off and it looks bad like before. I'll continue using jitter to offset the low-res look but jitter also adds noise to the map, so I guess I'll blur it out to blend the pixels but I'll keep looking for a solution because it seems like this isn't normal. I may attempt this on my laptop and see if it bakes differently.

EarthQuake

So what jitter does is basically dither the result, you can dither and get noise, or not dither and have these stair-stepping issues. The dithered noise is really subtle and won't be visible when you texture your asset, so I would leave it as is. Blurring might cause seams or other issues.