Normal map bake with hard edges/separated shells won't turn out smooth
polycounter lvl 3
I got a bit of an issue with normal baking I figured maybe someone could enlighten me on...
I've read through the stickied/wiki posts around here on the topic to see if I'm missing something obvious, but so far I haven't figured it out. Basically I'm getting seams/odd edges where I got hard edges in my lowpoly mesh - all the shells are separated where I got hard edges, which to my understanding should translate well in the bake.
Here's a sample part of my lowpoly mesh (note the hard edge at the front):
With baked normal applied:
Closeup to see the seams/artifacts:
The UV shells are all separate:
Here's the highpoly for reference:
As far as I understand normal baking, having hard edges in the lowpoly and separating these edges in separate UV shells should generate a result essentially perfectly smooth. As can be noted above, the parts with smooth edges and faces within the same UV shell do turn out perfectly fine, but where I have hard edges/separated shells, it's not working well. Is there anything I'm missing here? For baking I'm using xNormal, having tested all sorts of parameters. I also tried using Maya's Transfer Maps, both with and without a cage, but I'm running into the same issue. Would appreciate any advice!
I've read through the stickied/wiki posts around here on the topic to see if I'm missing something obvious, but so far I haven't figured it out. Basically I'm getting seams/odd edges where I got hard edges in my lowpoly mesh - all the shells are separated where I got hard edges, which to my understanding should translate well in the bake.
Here's a sample part of my lowpoly mesh (note the hard edge at the front):
With baked normal applied:
Closeup to see the seams/artifacts:
The UV shells are all separate:
Here's the highpoly for reference:
As far as I understand normal baking, having hard edges in the lowpoly and separating these edges in separate UV shells should generate a result essentially perfectly smooth. As can be noted above, the parts with smooth edges and faces within the same UV shell do turn out perfectly fine, but where I have hard edges/separated shells, it's not working well. Is there anything I'm missing here? For baking I'm using xNormal, having tested all sorts of parameters. I also tried using Maya's Transfer Maps, both with and without a cage, but I'm running into the same issue. Would appreciate any advice!
Replies
Here's the meshes if anyone wants to have a look at them in general:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7821237/Other/lowpoly.fbx
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7821237/Other/highpoly.fbx
This seems to happen to all my normal bakes regardless of the mesh, which makes me think I'm doing something fundamentally wrong in my workflow...