For this situation, should I use a contiguous mesh or separate meshes and exploded bake?

Travis C

So this shape has 2 separate meshes in its hi-poly form. There is a prominent seam in the hi-poly that is created with 2 meshes that are next to each other. For the lowpoly, I tried to make a contiguous mesh. But that screwed up the seam. 

here's the what the hi-poly looks like. it is made up of 1 large and 1 small mesh:


Here's the lowpoly contiguous mesh normal mapped result. As you can see, there is a harsh and highly pixelated line in the middle of the seam:
with  wireframe:


without wireframe:


I tried adding in some geo at where the seam is, but that didn't turn out well either:




So I'm not sure what the best course of action to take is. Should I just keep the 2 meshes separate for an exploded bake or is there a better way to do this?

or perhaps is this kind of seam not possible to bake, thus I should change how the hi-poly is?

musashidan

Exploding the bake will always yield better results, but might not be necessary. Did you bake your NM with AA?

huffer

That pixelated line is acceptable, but what can you do is increase filter size in transfer maps, to get slightly softer, blurred edges, and try to increase antialiasing , or even apply a small blur in photoshop over the jagged line.

Travis C

musashidan said:

Exploding the bake will always yield better results, but might not be necessary. Did you bake your NM with AA?

I don't know what AA means. does that mean anti aliasing?
I see an option to increase that in xNormal, but not in maya transfer maps.

huffer said:

That pixelated line is acceptable, but what can you do is increase filter size in transfer maps, to get slightly softer, blurred edges, and try to increase antialiasing , or even apply a small blur in photoshop over the jagged line.

I'll try that, thanks! do you know how to "increase filter size" in xNormal?

Travis C

anyone know?

m4dcow

I did a test, and upping the filter size in maya transfer maps fixes the issue. AA means anti aliasing, which didn't make as much of a difference in Maya for this issue as upping the filter amount did. I don't know of any setting like that in xNormal, but upping the anti aliasing helped a bit, and you could also bake at a larger size than your target resolution, and then scale down (sort of like a poor man's anti aliasing).

huffer

Oh there is no filtering in xNormal or 3dsmax, I assumed you used Maya's Transfer Maps, the equivalent would be applying some gaussian blur on those parts of the map, or maybe rendering twice as large and resizing down (but not with sharper setting in PS).