Normal baking problem

Roni55

Hi Polycount users
I have some basic baking problems, maybe someone can help me out here.
I have a very simple baisc mesh, 1. LP 2.HP 3.Cage, everyhing is created and looks the way it should.
But for some reasons i can't smooth my hard edges on my LP the way it looks on the HP. After baking the normal map in Substance Designer there is like no effect, it's like i'm looking on my LP without any normal map "same result with the Max bake". The Normal map itself looks also like there is almost nothing baked down.

All hard edges are splited up and have they're own uv shell and smoothing group. The curved mesh is the HP mesh, than LP and the last one is the Cage. Is there anything wrong with this setup ?

Joopson

Is the cage all one smoothing group?

Roni55

No the cage has the same "multiple" smoothing groups like the LP mesh.

Joopson

As I understand it, any hard edges in the cage will cause "missed" areas in the bake; in this case, it's probably missing the nice soft edges on the high poly. Try making the cage all one smoothing group, and see if that helps. (I'm not sure if there's ever a reason to avoid one smoothing group for the cage, but it's all I ever do, and I've never had an issue)

Roni55

Thats right any hard edge is missed. I just set the cage to one smoothing group but it didn't helped.
Here is another test of mine which has the same issue. Maybe you or someone else here could take a look.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/36ve2fazshzr1fx/Issue_01.FBX?dl=0

Roni55

Here is a picture of the above provided mesh, i still don't understand why i can't catch the details of the HP mesh. The LP is very very close to the HP, so where is the problem? Hard edges are also splited and have they're own smoothing group.

HP = red mesh
LP = yellow lines
Cage = not shown but it is slightly bigger than the LP mesh

Joopson

Baking it myself, with a new cage, the only issue I can see is that the edges on the high-poly are too sharp. I had to manually divide the mesh, by the way. The FBX provided hasn't been subdivided.

I tried with your cage, and my own cage. I got more or less the same results for each.

 I had to bump way up the resolution of the bake, the way the UVs were, before I could see the normal map's work well. This is an 8192x8192 map.



To make the cage, I duplicated the mesh, softened all the normals, and expanded it. And I didn't have any trouble with that. Could just be a texture resolution thing?

Roni55

I turned turbosmooth off before exporting the mesh, hmm i baked the mesh with a resolution of 4k without getting any details from the HP. The edges are to sharp on the HP ? Can you upload your version of my file ?
Maybe It's a stupid question but does it matter how many smoothing groups the HP mesh has ? or should i always reset all smoothing groups and set it to one ?
EDIT: I changed all the smoothings groups to one on the HP, now the bake looks good. Is this the way to go ? i never read before that i have to set all smoothigns group to one on the HP ?

Joopson

It depends on the mesh topology for the high. In certain cases, I could see smoothing groups interfering, but I didn't touch the smoothing groups on your high, so I can't say.
I forgot to mention, I used Maya. But it shouldn't make a difference, I don't believe.

Here's an updated FBX, after I exported:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/8nu07xmhlo2mq9p/ReUploadedMeshes.fbx?dl=0

Just to clarify, to cover all the bases, but you were baking with the turbosmoothed mesh, right?

Roni55

Yes the mesh was tubosmoothed but i simlpy could not catch the details, maybe it was wrong to autosmooth the HP ? What is rule for HP, should it have the smoothing groups like the LP ?
By the way, i do my bakes in Substance Designer, but i got the same baking result in max.

just frogot to write, thank you very much for your help!