Skewmesh Tutorial

Mark Dygert

Peter K goes over an interesting work around to fix details that normally skew when baking normal maps

Take a bolt for example, baked to a flat surface. The angle of the cage often skews the bolt, but not if you follow Peter's advice and insert a skewmesh into your baking process...

 

3dsmax

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8nvDgvKbSs

 

xNormal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRNL_21Ee_w

 

We are talking about them HERE

wizo

great trick, thank you so much for sharing!

sqrRedwend

!

beefaroni

Woooah. Thank you!!

WaYWO

thanks for the awesome trick!

instg8r

Great trick! I've been baking out object space maps more recently, so this is great!

Nolt

This may save me tons of time! Sometimes I have to project multiple times and combine the different projections in photoshop. Thanks for sharing!

SrgFlamez

This was so helpful

garriola83

Good trick, but nothing entirely new. There other ways such as cutting the mesh to make verts right on where the bolts would be on a low poly clone. Then just delete the clone and apply on your old copy of the mesh. Just a long as you don't mess with the UVs or the low poly geo too much. To each their own.

Mark Dygert

garriola83 I think that will work in a handful of cases but ultimately has a fatal flaw because the normals of the final low poly won't match the edited clone. It might work for a few things because the normals are "close enough" or the flaw is in a place that is hard to see. Peter's method doesn't have that issue because the normals never change after baking the final normal map.

garriola83

Hmm, I just did it, quick and dirty, no skewing.
[img]https://db.tt/53XOEbmJ[/img]

EarthQuake

garrialo, the big problem is that you're editing the mesh normals, which will cause smoothing errors in a lot of cases. You don't see it on your example here because the top faces are totally flat and split on their own smoothing group/with hard edges around. If that wasnt the case (often with more complex models) you'll introduce errors when baking a normal map and edting the mesh after the fact.

garriola83

ahh makes sense, gotcha

JohanL

is there any advantage with this method over baking the bolts with raycasting and then just masking them out on the cage-baked one?