How to bake seamless normal from one high poly to multiple low polys
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Hello.
I'm working on a character and I want to use several 4k maps for the mesh so there are more details visible.
I sculpted a high poly mesh in ZBrush, retopoed it in 3Ds Max and broke the lowpoly into 3 major pieces - body, arm, head. I exported each piece as a separate .obj file and loaded them all into xNormal for baking. I also loaded my single highpoly mesh there and baked all three separate textures. I also made sure that borders between objects are straight edges on UVs, so they are parallel to pixels.
Then I joined all three pieces together in 3Ds max while preserving their UVs and therefore in result I had a single mesh with three different UV unwraps on it.
But when I load that mesh into any program for rendering or texturing, like Substance Painter or Marmoset and add normal maps, there is an ugly seam going right where the objects were separate from each other. If I remove normal maps there is no seam whatsoever, a lowpoly mesh is seamless perfect single smoothing group. But normal maps clearly add that seam. And there are no seams between UV islands within maps themselves, so it's clearly an issue of wrong baking process.
So my question is: how to bake those normal maps properly to get several different UV maps on one object without any seams on it?
Here are screenshots of that seam + normal maps of the body and the head, where that seam occurs
I'm working on a character and I want to use several 4k maps for the mesh so there are more details visible.
I sculpted a high poly mesh in ZBrush, retopoed it in 3Ds Max and broke the lowpoly into 3 major pieces - body, arm, head. I exported each piece as a separate .obj file and loaded them all into xNormal for baking. I also loaded my single highpoly mesh there and baked all three separate textures. I also made sure that borders between objects are straight edges on UVs, so they are parallel to pixels.
Then I joined all three pieces together in 3Ds max while preserving their UVs and therefore in result I had a single mesh with three different UV unwraps on it.
But when I load that mesh into any program for rendering or texturing, like Substance Painter or Marmoset and add normal maps, there is an ugly seam going right where the objects were separate from each other. If I remove normal maps there is no seam whatsoever, a lowpoly mesh is seamless perfect single smoothing group. But normal maps clearly add that seam. And there are no seams between UV islands within maps themselves, so it's clearly an issue of wrong baking process.
So my question is: how to bake those normal maps properly to get several different UV maps on one object without any seams on it?
Here are screenshots of that seam + normal maps of the body and the head, where that seam occurs
Replies
depending of the method used max rear/front distance value this would give you bad result, even if you are using a cage.
The best you can do is too split you high poly mesh into three parts and then bake each low poly meshes independently.
if you use substance to bake the ideal workflow is :
1. merge your low poly model per uv set
2. export multiple highres mesh and name them accordingly to that article :
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Matching+by+name
hope it help