Sleeve Seals (Doodling)

CptAlbatross

Am I wasting my time with the one of the left? I'm trying to setup my low poly model for this sleeve piece and I though it would be cool if I could capture some of the grooves seen in the high poly. I guess I should bake it and find out myself, but I was interested in what others had to say.

CptAlbatross

Hey guys, so I finished the texturing on this, but I have a problem. I keep getting this weird faceting on the edges of cycliders when baking my normal maps. I seem to always have this issue, but no matter how I adjust my cage or smoothing groups, it still seems to pop up. What is it that I'm doing wrong here? I'm using the projection map tools in Max to create my base maps. Should I be using something else? I hear people using Xnormals a lot.

ActionDawg

Check out this thread for help on the "faceting" (waviness) you describe. This is actually the correct behavior.
http://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

The OP should answer all your questions, but you have 4 options in total:
Increase the number of cylinder segments.
Use texturing to hide it.
Match your low poly geo to the high (not standard practice and probably not recommended, but I cover this on the last page of that thread).
Don't worry about it.

On the subject of actually generating these maps, don't use Max for baking. It is not synced to any other renderers so your results will appear slightly worse than they really are unless you render in Max. Use xNormal or for an even more modern workflow, Substance has better bakers.

CptAlbatross

somedoggy said:

Check out this thread for help on the "faceting" (waviness) you describe. This is actually the correct behavior.
http://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

The OP should answer all your questions, but you have 4 options in total:
Increase the number of cylinder segments.
Use texturing to hide it.
Match your low poly geo to the high (not standard practice and probably not recommended, but I cover this on the last page of that thread).
Don't worry about it.

On the subject of actually generating these maps, don't use Max for baking. It is not synced to any other renderers so your results will appear slightly worse than they really are unless you render in Max. Use xNormal or for an even more modern workflow, Substance has better bakers.

I'm working primarily with Quixel right now so I'll give Xnormal a shot. Jeez.... is Max good for anything?

ActionDawg

Modeling :P

CptAlbatross

lol