Horrific Normal Baking Errors?

Dan Powell

Hi Polycount,

Using XNormal to bake a Normal map, but I'm getting some horrifying smoothing errors and I don't know what's causing them.

- My cage on the low poly mesh looks fine. Everything should be triangulated correctly.

- UVs look fine to me.

- Normals look fine on the High and Low poly.

- Test bakes in 3DS Max look OK to me. Never great bakes but they're showing no errors

High Poly and Low Poly:



What XNormal has spat out for me:



What 3DS Max produced (just a 1k test render to error check):



I've uploaded the FBX objects to Sendspace

NOTE: For some reason they export with the "OpenSubDiv" modifier. You can just delete that modifier from the stack when you import and apply a Turbosmooth

The topology for the high poly is a bit all over the place but it smooths correctly :P

Any advice/help is much appreciated as always.

Thanks!

Quack!

Those puke green colors are usually from inverted normals in the high poly. Have you reset xforms on both the low and high?

Dan Powell

Quack! wrote: »

Those puke green colors are usually from inverted normals in the high poly. Have you reset xforms on both the low and high?

I have the low but not the high - good shout. I'll give that a go now

Dan Powell

No puke colour anymore but still all sorts of weird artefacts

Dan Powell

Normals were flipped after resetting XForm. Getting better results but still some artefacts to clean up

EarthQuake

Looks like pixel padding, not a bad thing (very good, in fact, helps with mipmapping). You could stand to have a lot more pixel padding, as too much is not a thing.

Never look at a normal map in 2D to diagnose problems, apply it to your mesh and see what it actually looks like.

Dan Powell

EarthQuake wrote: »

Looks like pixel padding, not a bad thing (very good, in fact, helps with mipmapping). You could stand to have a lot more pixel padding, as too much is not a thing.

Never look at a normal map in 2D to diagnose problems, apply it to your mesh and see what it actually looks like.

I've got padding set to 8 at the moment. I've fixed most of the stuff. The remaining issues are where the UVs have just skewed for some odd reason - presumably because there were normal errors.

I've got it open in Marmoset too (awesome work on that by the way!) Not solely relying on the 2D as that would be difficult to see in context

EarthQuake

Post some images of the problem areas in 3d, that will make it easier to give suggestions.

Also this thread may help with skewing issues: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147227

Dan Powell

As a whole it's not looking so bad now. Been gradually sorting stuff whilst making tea.



Just a couple of little issues left:

The octagon shape with the circlular extrusion might need a few more sides to help smooth it nicely.



Couple of smoothing errors here - probably smoothing groups or too little geometry?

Dan Powell

Thanks for all the help/suggestions too folks!

Quack!

Glad you got it sorted out! Keep on kicking ass.