[HELP] Baking normal maps

DanielPeres

Hey there, I have been working in a briefcase prop for a school project, by now I have both the HP and the LP but when I started baking normal maps my problems started. I get seams in some of the edges even though I have UV splits whenever I have a different smoothing group and I am using a cage to bake (I tried to bake with max and xnormal and both give me the same result)

Seams in MT2:


Low Poly model:


High Poly model:


UV's:

DanielPeres

I still have the same problem with the seams but now I have a new one. When I bake the normal map as a TGA I get a very noisy normal map, like this:



When I bake in PNG, TIFF, BMP or JPEG I get this kind of scattered normal map:



I have tried a lot of different settings and none of them seems to do much difference...two problems now

Brian "Panda" Choi

What are you using to bake your maps?

DanielPeres

I tried both Max Render to texture and xNormal and I always get the same problems. In max I get the ones that I mentioned above, in xNormal I get only the second one

DanielPeres

Okay I now tried to bake in xNormal using TIFF and that problem is solved. It seems that the noisy/scattered problem is due to te compreesion of the files, don't know why max is doing it even with TIFF format. Still have the problem with the seams tought

DanielPeres

Well I played a bit wit max TIFF settings and that did the problem so, problem solved for both Max and xNormal. Now my seams problem is still here. I have noticed that the problem that I am having with the seams is that everywhere that I have an UV split the normal map looks like there is a cut and the light behaves differently in both sides of the split...

CarlK3D

You're edges seem a little tight, it might be having trouble baking to both sides, I'd try softening the edges. However I've found once all your textures are setup it's hard to ever really notice any seam. Unless you were working on something large perhaps.

Gazu

Hm....but when you zoom Maximum in, i think that the LowPoly Edge is still visible, with normalmap applied,too. So i dont think its a Seam?

LaurentiuN

Thats a minor seam, you should get away when the object is textured.

Eric Chadwick

Moving this from 3D Showcase to Technical Talk. 

DanielPeres

Well the seam is indeed very small and thin so I guess you guys are correct that it won't even be noticed when I texture it. I'll keep going with the work because time is short and I'll let you know how it looks after texturing