Incorrectly Baked Normal Maps

Aured

Hello all. I'm baking normal maps for the first time and I'm experiencing a rather annoying problem. In the background is the source mesh, a briefly made corridor section, and in the foreground is a low-polygon version with the exact same dimensions. I super-imposed the two over each other and baked 2k tangent-space normals at the highest quality settings. This is the result. The horizontal normals are completely invisible unless viewed at extreme angles. There are strange lines on the ceiling. I have no idea why some of the details from the source mesh is presented on the normal map, while other parts are completely omitted. Help, please?

Without Normal Maps: 


With Normal Maps: 


Thanks in advance for any and all support. 

kanga

Just a couple of things to check:
The low poly cage cannot be the same dimensions as the source mesh because there is no room to project the details.
It looks like you dont have hard angles, but if you do you should split them a little to help projection.
The best results even on simple forms are achieved by using a projection cage, and apps like xnormal have export options that accommodate that.

You probably know this already,.. but just in case.

Aured

Thank you for the reply Kanga. I reduced the cage size to inside the Mesh and the results are precisely the same.

I am new to baking normals, so I assume that Maya is unreliable for simple forms such as this?  

huffer

Post the scene file maybe? It's hard to say what the problem is. Also that's not the right attitude   - "I am new to driving, I keep hitting things, I assume cars are unreliable as such?"