Curved Surface Bake Error

atomander

Hi folks, trying to bake out what should be a pretty straight forward map, but running into lots of issues. I've created a lamp asset, with the low poly shown below, and the highpoly simply a turbosmoothed version with some nicer beveled edges and smoother flares.



However, when I bake out the normal for these in xNormal, the area near the seams on the flared sections don't seem to match up. And I can't figure out the cause; no flipped normals, smoothing groups set up appropriately along seams, etc. Any ideas what might be causing this?

Visible seam with normal map:


Trouble areas highlighted in normal map:


Thanks in advance!

Emanuel_palalic

I can't really think of many issues. Do you think you might have hardened some edges on accident? Also are these normals left handed or right handed? You might have to flip the green channel depending on how you baked it. What compression are you using on the image? That also may cause some issues.

Emanuel_palalic

You might want to try baking with some padding as well.

EarthQuake

Yep looks like green channel needs to be inverted, probably due to baking in max and previewing somewhere else. What are you using to bake, and what to preview?

WaYWO

First you need to take in account the mirrored UVs,
so when you bake i assume you bake the half of the object or either move the mirrored UVs aside...

as Emanuel_palalic said go ahead and put some padding in your bake
and most importantly check your export option (on the model you are applying the normal map to) for fbx Max should have options such tangents and binormals, make sure you uncheck this and apply the normal map on the exported mesh to check other errors.

atomander

Thanks for the responses! I am exporting both my high poly and low poly models from max to bake in xNormal. The bake results look great when taken into Marmoset and using a UE4 default template:



No Seam! Perfect Bake?

But on taking it into Unreal, I get am still getting a seam along the UV. Flipping the green channel doesn't seem to help.



There are no mirrored UV's in this model. Any other ideas what might be up?

AdvisableRobin

Make sure that the normal map's compression is set to TC_Normal and not something else. I believe if you name your map _n or _normal it'll auto set it to normal map compression.

atomander

That was it! What I thought was inverted normals I think was actually just bad compression/low lightmap resolution! Thanks AdvisableRobin!