Flat surface artifacts?
I know it’s a tale as old as time, and please don’t get mad at me for asking because I’ve been reading every polycount topic on normal maps/baking for the past 3 days and still can’t find an answer, but i’m still pulling my hair out because for the life of me I cannot figure out why two almost identical cubes, both with a bevel of 0.05, but one with 1 segment and one with 15 segments (low and high poly) creates these square artifacts upon baking the normal map!
Do the vertex normals of a flat surface on the low poly have to be IDENTICAL to the high poly version? The faces are the exact same size, the exact same rotation, and the exact same place in xyz space, history deleted, transforms frozen, ect. I’ve been reading the post ‘You’re making me hard (ect.)‘, Understanding average normals and ray projections (ect.)’, and scouring the internet in general, but I can’t seem to find anything about this and I would greatly appreciate any help.
And I hope it goes without saying, but the cube is obviously just a test scene, I just don’t want to model out a complex model with lots of hard faces just to find out on baking the normal map from a high poly version that every flat face is going to have these artifacts. And finally just in case people are wondering, the cubes were created in Maya 2016, and the baking was done in substance designer, substance painter, and xnormals, all with artifacts basically along those same lines.
UPDATE: Okay, I think it may have found the answer in "Of Bit Depths, Banding and Normal Maps," i.e., I was baking in an 8 bit image format which doesn't have the precision or dithering effect that a 16 bit has. So I guess nevermind? But if anyone has other input, I'd be okay with that too
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But more importantly, look at real-world usage. Color maps etc. will hide a multitude of small banding errors, once you get everything all working together in-game.
So, do a full pipeline to see what the impact is. Probably not worth the extra effort, in the end.
I see that now, I just finished the asset I was having that trouble with and in the end the roughness level and base color covered the bands up anyway :P Thanks for the input!