White dots on normal map (3dsmax baking)

r0tzbua

Hey guys,

I'm kind of at the end of my knowledge and pretty much tried everything I could think of (never encountered such a problem so there wasn't that much I could think of).

I received a high and low poly mesh (modeled in Maya, exported in FBX) and UVed and exploded it for baking in 3ds Max. I did everything as I normally do it (Render Settings, etc)

When baking now though I get quite a lot of white dots on my normal maps, and also while baking it already is visible on the progress. Some screenshots:





Any input or pointers on what may be going on would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time in advance.

Cheers.

Apocrs1980

I would try Baking your maps out in Xnormal and see if you are still getting the same results.
I recently tried it out and it's an extremely powerful tool and doesn't cost you a dime, also I have had no issues with baking out my normal and AO maps.

r0tzbua

Hey thanks for the reply, I tried xNormal already and while it doesn't give me that exact result, the normals are broken as well, so obviously there is something fundamentally wrong here, I just can't get behind what exactly.

Apocrs1980

Strange. I did stumble across this post I don't know if it will help or give some insight.
http://polycount.com/discussion/88372/xnormal-normal-map-artifacts-blue-yellow
and this thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/98373/normal-map-bake-artifacts-warning-9-screenshots
Can't say I have ever had that exact problem in baking, but most baking problems that generate artifacts are from the bias being too constrained, Normals being flipped, or the model needing to be exploded or use a cage.   

Eric Chadwick

Models coming from Maya to Max often need their transforms reset. Did you try Reset Xform, followed by Collapse?

Also could be the renderer you are using. Is it set to Mentalray? Go to Render Setup to see. Mentalray has had the problem of trying to render both the highpoly and the lowpoly model into the bake.

I've also seen this if the highpoly model has a normal map assigned to it already in its material. For example:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking#Solving_Pixel_Artifacts

kanga

I had problems with artifacts in my max bakes and I traced it back to the lowpoly cage. Seems if I modelled the lowpoly on top of the high so that the polys didnt intersect the hipoly, apply a projection cage, I got artifacts. If I let the polys from the lowpoly intersect the high poly and then corrected their heights with the projection cage, I got a clean bake! So in your case I would import both hi and lo models and check how they look (maybe you already did) apply a projection cage and bake. There are also scaling issues between max and maya. You could try converting the lopoly to a mesh and see if that helps.

Zihaben

Well, Im here 7 years later and it must be a little late, but lets write it down for those who will google this issue. In my case, dots were produced by some very rare and unreparable bug in 3dmax rasterization pipeline, and I fixed it by 1) reseting 3dmax (File-> Reset )  2) merging all the geometry from problematic file to the new empty scene.

Ruz

I wass just going to suggest resetting xform, but its a bit late now

iam717

He returns to update the thread with the solution, that is dedication and after so long, commendable.