Shield normal baking. ZBrush x Blender x xNormal.

Szani

Hello there.

I am trying to make lowpoly shield. It's my first sculpt of something like that and i have some problems with baking texture in xnormal.
So this is my highpoly sculpt in ZBrush. Every part of model is saparated subtool.


I tried to figure it out how to retopo it and have few types of retopo.
version 1:

Version 2 (simpliest)


version 3 (according to examples in web)


So, when I am trying to put the last one into xNormal there is error I don't know why.
In first and second version I had 2 problems: Weird artifacts on handles and what is most important. Because of reason handles made (shadow?) on the planks. I don't know how to turn it off. Here how textures looks like:


I looked for tutorials in web but never found problem like with this shadow thing. And why third model can't go into xNormal?

Scruples

The handle is close enough to the shield where it's sampling from the planks.
As with all things 3d you can solve this in a few ways (with varying degrees of success and speed). You can
-Reduce the ray distance in Xnormal, fastest but least likely to work.
-Explode your bake, guaranteed to work but you won't get the AO interaction between the handle and the shield anymore, (there's some techniques around this but I'm not going into that).
-Create a cage in Xnormal and adjust the cage so the handle doesn't sample the planks.
-Create a cage in an external program (Zbrush's inflate is really good at this) and import into Xnormal.

Szani

Thank you!
The first advice worked!
But I will keep in mind other ways.
Thank you once again.