Problems with baking

Nightmare106

Hi, am doing simple planar baking, I have been planar baking before but sometimes I encounter this issue, I was able to solve it once but this time I can't, I've ditched xnormal and went for 3DS Max's RTT but am still getting the same issue. What am I doing wrong? XDDDD

http://imageshack.com/a/img903/3930/lg2X41.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img903/9467/PDpiiW.jpg

Nightmare106

UPDATE: Managed to get it working in 3ds Max by creating a new file and importing all of my meshes into it with brand new settings (one of the settings must be doing this. But I still can't get it to bake properly in Xnormal and baking a quality map in 3ds max takes forever
http://imageshack.com/a/img903/8471/8uRN8T.jpg So, if anyone can help I would really appreciate their time!

motionblur

I don't know about 3DS Max baking quirks but in general this looks like some sort of perspective distortion is introduced into your baking. Since a planar bake should by itself not introduce perspective distortion a few stabs in the dark:
Does the plane which you bake from have a smoothgroup assigned to it or have its vertex normals smoothed instead of hardened somehow?
Or are you actually baking from a camera by any chance instead of a plane?
And if you are baking from your camera - sure the perspective is turned off?
Otherwise it's probably the UVs of the bakeplane that are simply off somehow.

The normal map bakes themselves are usually pretty fast for me.
What problems do you have with xNormal?

Eric Chadwick

Also check the Projection cage, by default it skews to try to fit the highpoly objects. I always reset it and push it out manually.

Speed should not be a problem unless your supersampling is set too high, or some other render setting is cranked too high.

Nightmare106

I've turned off smoothing on both planes for the cage and the plane, I've tried moving the plane, the plane UV's are default (I used create plane, set size 128x128 and using default UV as mentioned), applied Edit Poly, removed smoothing, measured my rays and and applies them in Xnormal, set my AO, normal and curvature quality settings. I can bake it out normally now in 3ds max but when I try a 2048x2048 map, it's taking... well it's still rendering and it's been rendering for the past 20 minutes... but there are no perspective distortions like in screenshot shown, am doing a new render because I've ensured that everything tiles well together properly. UPDATE: Okay it rendered out, normal map is fine but AO is completely off, there is blurring in the trim area and at the top there's this weird artifacting thats destroying my tiling, I suppose I could clean it up in Photoshop but this I don't know why this is happening. http://imageshack.com/a/img907/79/KlBoK7.jpg

Nightmare106

It renders fine in Xnormal now, problem was scaling, I scaled up the cage a little bit which was causing this, best to leave cage the same size as lowpoly for planar baking I suppose.

Eric Chadwick

If you understand what the cage does (the baker fires rays inwards towards the model, from cage vertex to model vertex) then you'll see why scaling is a bad idea.

Nightmare106

Yes I when I realized the problem it made perfect sense to me, because the object was scaled the ray was going straight until it bent outwards when it went for the cage or other way around in Xnormal I guess, this was causing the normals to be skewed and distorted. The cage needs to be the same as the low poly planes in order for the rays to be correctly captured. Thanks a lot for help and response guys!