xNormal Baking Problems

ScrotieFlapWack

Hi Guys,

So I found this sweet tutorial on baking, somewhere on the Polycount Wiki. I have been practising and trying to understand everything there is to baking due to how popular it is for game artists.

I am running in to some problems. I am following this tutorial to a T but whenever I bake in xNormal I get nothing showing on my normal map after the bake is completed.

Here is some screens:

My test models. There is the high poly, low poly and a cage.



Here are the models all zeroed out and history is deleted.



Here is my low poly's UV's.



Here is the results from xNormal after I put my high and low poly and external cage file in there.



Here are the baking settings. I have tangent space normal ticked and no swizzling, all the normal map options are default.



I don't know where I am going wrong. I have put the default scale of meshes in xNormal to 2.0000 because I kept getting a message before baking telling me if the results aren't good to scale up the models.

Any help is appreciated, this is a workflow I am trying to learn to improve my modelling skills and get a good understanding of how to bake normal maps.

Cheers guys

Dave.

Bartalon

Check xNormal's 3D viewer with all your models loaded in, it can help isolate the problem further. I have had instances where one of my models was turned off which caused problems.

Additionally, make sure you are actually subdividing your mesh before exporting, not just exporting the smooth preview. It could be you are getting no normal info in your bake because there is literally no difference between your LP and HP.

ScrotieFlapWack

@Bartalon. I cheked all the things you mentioned and it seems everything is ok. My models are in the 3D Viewer in xNormal and my high poly mesh has been subdivided properly from Maya LT too.

Here are the models in xNormal 3D Viewer.



Here is the high poly in Maya LT.



The models I exported as .OBJ with their normals and the option on the high poly and low poly is selected as 'Use exported normals'. I bake and get the same results

m4dcow

You need to actually smooth your high poly, and not the smooth preview. I don't know if that puts you up against the LT polygon export limit.

ScrotieFlapWack

Ok I am a dumbass. I was exporting the high poly without actually subdividing like you said lol. I was pressing 3 on my keyboard which only gives me the smooth preview. I did subdivide my mesh but now I am not getting really good results lol



Those black borders look horrible, as far as I am aware they aren't gaps. I heard that baking hard surface stuff if you have harsh angles on your low poly it is best to split the UV's in to their own shells, the UV's are in my above post if that helps

ScrotieFlapWack

@m4dcow. I think the limit is something like 65k per object, I'm not sure haha. The high poly is around 48 thousand (98 thousand tri's).

The results above aren't very nice, there has been no change to my UV's, I have changed the cage though to fit the low poly as close as I can.

AdvisableRobin

Normal maps aren't magic, they can't effect the silhouette of the object. You're trying to project the normals of a smoothed cube onto a harsh cube, but you're lowpoly simply doesn't have enough geometry to accurately follow the silhouette of the highpoly.

Try beveling the edges down on the lowpoly.

ScrotieFlapWack

Putting bevels there doesn't massively help but I understand what you mean. That is something I have read about when doing high and low poly baking.

Here is the results after adding a bevel of 2 divisions on all the edges of the cube.



Here is the tutorial if anyone is wondering what I am watching. I still haven't got very good results, I'm gonna keep on playing around with it and probably try it out on a more complex model as a cube may be a bad example.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww&list=PLmR7KMNjA7GK8fHPHM4l-wNwVafWOgNNU"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww&list=PLmR7KMNjA7GK8fHPHM4l-wNwVafWOgNNU[/ame]

Joopson

So, Maya 2016 added in a color space dropdown in the texture settings. By default, it's set to sRGB, which makes normal maps look majorly wonky. Change it to "RAW" and change the texture's filter type to refresh the preview, and it should look like what you expect it to.





If it still doesn't look quite right, you may have to change the tangent-space coordinate system to "Left Handed", instead of the default "Right Handed". But that'll only help if your normals were baked to be X+ Y- Z+, which isn't xnormal's default.

ScrotieFlapWack

@Joopson. Thank you very much man! I was wondering why the background was black in Maya LT lol.

The results!



Very happy thanks for all the help guys, I think I have a fairly good understanding of baking now and what to look out for to get a perfect bake. Gonna start working on some high and low poly stuff XD