DDO Seam Issues!!!!

mrgilbert159

Iv been working on hard surface modelling now for 4 days and im getting issue after issue. I was having loads of issues with my normal map baking in maya. I wasn't getting the seams to work correctly. 
After figuring it out with basically UV splitting ALL of my faces. I now have another issue when taking it to ddo.
As you can see in the first image the edges are great. but i then noticed that i wasn't getting any detail on the edges when applying my smart materials. So i did a new layer and turned on curvature to see what was happening. 
As you can see im getting seam issues AGAIN! This is happening in a lot of my maps. its noticeable even in my colour map!
Any help will be great. I'm going mad because this should be relatively easy stuff!!! 

Another example with a test object.

musashidan

Have you tried the fix seams button, top right of the screen? 

mrgilbert159

Ye I tried that, Nothing happend.

musashidan

What does your curvature map look like? Did you bake it in 3Do?

Obscura

Do you use edge padding?

mrgilbert159

Musashidan i've tried both. making my own normal and baking with 3do. I get a better result making my own but im still getting the seam issues.

mrgilbert159

Obcsura I havent no. How do apply edge padding?

musashidan

mrgilbert159 said:

Obcsura I havent no. How do apply edge padding?

You can set your edge padding when you pack your unwrap. It's the amount of pixels between each UV shell. This is to prevent edge bleed between UV islands for both baking and mip-mapping.(1 pixel=1 mip level up to 16 pixels=5 mip levels)

Obscura

*Pixel* padding. Sry...When the edge pixels are extended out. When you don't have this, then you'll get such seam line errors once the texture gets mipped.

mrgilbert159

Musashidan How do I go about padding my edges. What's the process? Thanks

.Wiki

You can create your padding on the baking process of your maps OR with a xNormal-Filter for Photoshop.

mrgilbert159

.Wiki said:

You can create your padding on the baking process of your maps OR with a xNormal-Filter for Photoshop.

Iv padded all my maps. It cleaned up my normal map a bit better but still getting the seam issue with my curvature map and colour

defragger

I think the chamfer on your high-poly messes up the normalmap because there is only one edge in your low-poly. Its visible on the first screenshot. Try to Bevel the edges of the low-poly mesh when there are such round corners in your high-poly.

huffer

defragger said:

I think the chamfer on your high-poly messes up the normalmap because there is only one edge in your low-poly. Its visible on the first screenshot. Try to Bevel the edges of the low-poly mesh when there are such round corners in your high-poly.

It's standard workflow of baking normal maps with hard edges...you shouldn't have to bevel the low poly.
@MRGILBERT159 Can you post the color map with the UV's overlayed on top of it?

defragger

http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html

defragger

huffer said:

defragger said:

I think the chamfer on your high-poly messes up the normalmap because there is only one edge in your low-poly. Its visible on the first screenshot. Try to Bevel the edges of the low-poly mesh when there are such round corners in your high-poly.

It's standard workflow of baking normal maps with hard edges...you shouldn't have to bevel the low poly.
@MRGILBERT159 Can you post the color map with the UV's overlayed on top of it?

yes you can either do loads of UV seams and smoothing group splitting on hard edges or bevel once. The final Vertex count will be very similar. Tri-count will be higher with the bevel. But therefore the silhouette will be more accurate.

huffer

Yes, both approaches are used, I'm just saying that there shouldn't be any reason to bevel the edges to fix any issue he's having (and so change the approach), because using a single hard edge and UV splits is a tried and proven method.

defragger

huffer said:

Yes, both approaches are used, I'm just saying that there shouldn't be any reason to bevel the edges to fix any issue he's having (and so change the approach), because using a single hard edge and UV splits is a tried and proven method.

yep, but there is something wrong with the normalmap. Is it ok in Marmoset or any other viewer?
Can we see UV islands please.

Obscura

Can you show your normalmap, and your model, without the normalmap applied? Maybe you don't have Uv splits and padding between the UV shells, where the smoothing splits are.

vertex_

Looks like a bad normal map bake. Were you using a cage, split UVs, and separated smoothing groups/unlocked normals for those faces?

mrgilbert159

huffer said:

defragger said:

I think the chamfer on your high-poly messes up the normalmap because there is only one edge in your low-poly. Its visible on the first screenshot. Try to Bevel the edges of the low-poly mesh when there are such round corners in your high-poly.

It's standard workflow of baking normal maps with hard edges...you shouldn't have to bevel the low poly.
@MRGILBERT159 Can you post the color map with the UV's overlayed on top of it?

Sure. Thanks for all the responses.

mrgilbert159

defragger said:

huffer said:

Yes, both approaches are used, I'm just saying that there shouldn't be any reason to bevel the edges to fix any issue he's having (and so change the approach), because using a single hard edge and UV splits is a tried and proven method.

yep, but there is something wrong with the normalmap. Is it ok in Marmoset or any other viewer?
Can we see UV islands please.

I agree. I shouldn't have to bevel if I have UV splits. Here's another post I did that might help understand:

I was told lots of times it could be my padding. So I padded up as you will see from my maps. I thought this was going to fix it and it surely should.
But now seeing this I think its a ddo issue not my maps issue.
Basically you can see from the image bellow that im getting seams where i have UV split my faces. But where they are meeting they are fine. I changed my curvature map to see if anything changed but nothing changed. I also checked the 'Bake in 3do' box to see if anything changes.... Again nothing changed.
So ive concluded that ddo is not using my curvature map or even my obj map.
God knows what other maps its not using as I cant see.

musashidan

I'm starting to think this is a ddo issue. I've tested QS2 myself and find the 3do curvature bake to be shit. Plus the fact that your NM looks pretty good in the first image leads me to think ddo is at fault. 

Edit - although looking at the first image again, not on my phone screen, I see the issues on your NM. Despite this I still blame ddo!   

mrgilbert159

musashidan said:

I'm starting to think this is a ddo issue. I've tested QS2 myself and find the 3do curvature bake to be shit. Plus the fact that your NM looks pretty good in the first image leads me to think ddo is at fault. 

I agree. I've explored every option to fix the seams. I've learnt a lot with smoothing groups and UV seams etc along the way which is good. But i've come to the conclusion that its ddo. The curvature maps it creates are not good (for me anyway)
What i need to find out now is how to make it use MY curvature maps.

defragger

Also did some testing with a hard surface mesh yesterday ... and yep the 3do curvature is pretty much crap. AO also not glorious. Testing on importing curvature from Knald into QS2 at the moment.

huffer

Well I'm a little confused now - in the color map with UV's on top there is no padding... And from my experience, yeah, baking the curvature in 3do will not be good, but if you leave it at generated from normal map (default settings) it's pretty good..I wouldn't use something else. But I'm 90 percent sure the original problem is because there is no padding on your color map.

mrgilbert159

defragger said:

Also did some testing with a hard surface mesh yesterday ... and yep the 3do curvature is pretty much crap. AO also not glorious. Testing on importing curvature from Knald into QS2 at the moment.

Hmmmm never heard of them. Got a thread where with what your working on?

mrgilbert159

huffer said:

Well I'm a little confused now - in the color map with UV's on top there is no padding... And from my experience, yeah, baking the curvature in 3do will not be good, but if you leave it at generated from normal map (default settings) it's pretty good..I wouldn't use something else. But I'm 90 percent sure the original problem is because there is no padding on your color map.

Oops so sorry I have two sets of maps. One with padding and one without. Here's the correct maps.

huffer

Have you updated to lastest quixel suite version? There was a bug that didn't apply (make use of) the reimported color id map...other than that..weird issue

mrgilbert159

huffer said:

Have you updated to lastest quixel suite version? There was a bug that didn't apply (make use of) the reimported color id map...other than that..weird issue

Just about to. Fingers crossed. Cheers for the help

musashidan

huffer said:

Well I'm a little confused now - in the color map with UV's on top there is no padding... And from my experience, yeah, baking the curvature in 3do will not be good, but if you leave it at generated from normal map (default settings) it's pretty good..I wouldn't use something else. But I'm 90 percent sure the original problem is because there is no padding on your color map.

This is strange alright, because if you look at the 2 NMs above(what it should be & what it is) the one on the left has padding and it looks as if the one on the right has had its padding clipped to the UV shell borders??

Also, just did a quick test myself and you're right, the default curvature generated the from the NM is much better than the 3do bake.