Lowpoly mesh triangles appearing in normal map

H3GGERS

Hi there,

I'm sure this isn't the first time someone's come crying for help to this fine userbase and I do want to start by saying that I have been trying to comb through all the great articles and posts that might help me solve this on my own.

That said, I was wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction toward solving this problem. I'm extremely new to the normal baking process and am totally at a loss trying to figure out how to resolve this issue:



My workflow so far is this:

- sculpt in zbrush, triangulate the high poly mesh (~300k tris) and export out as an .obj, then decimate it down to anywhere between 200 - 2000 tris and export out as the lowpoly.
- import both .obj's into Maya and unwrap the low poly and slightly smooth the high poly. export both out as new objs
- currently I'm experimenting with Substance as my baking tool of choice (though i was getting the same artifacts by doing it in Maya as well). I'm setting it to raytrace in from the averaged normals with aliasing set to 4x4. These are my current settings:


So thats about it. I'm guessing if anything this is an issue with my UV? But maybe not since it doesnt seem like these artifacts are limited to the edges of my UV shells? Anyway, hopefully someone here can point me down the right path

Scruples

Check if your uv's are welded in Maya before baking, it looks like what happens if they uv's were split on every single edge, which is not too out of the norm for Zbrush to export sometimes.

H3GGERS

Oh that definitely seems like it could be it! 

I'm relatively new to Maya so I may need a little bit more info though. Coming from C4D I'm used to thinking about welding as combining vertex's and whatnot. Seems like Maya call's this 'merging' so is that what you mean? Any chance you could elaborate a bit?

Thanks!

Scruples

The quickest way to check is to grab a single vertex (in the UV editor) and Select>Shell Border. Yes Polygons>Merge Vertices is the same as welding. If you want to see the UV borders in the viewport, with the object selected in object mode go to Display>Polygons>Texture Border Edges (adjust border display width in the same menu 'Edge Width'.).

H3GGERS

Thanks for your help! While what it ended up being was that I needed to unlock and smooth the normals of the lowpoly mesh coming in from Zbrush, all of your suggestions definitely helped me further understand the process!