Render Normal Map in 3ds Max

Illu

Hi, this is my first post here. I know its a simple questions but I couldnt find an answer. After trying yesterday all night I am finally asking here. Why does my Normal Map come out this funky? I made a really basic box with some wood planks. I sliced several times into the box as well as the planks in order to get a nice output with TurboSmooth. So High Poly is looking fine and low poly too which is a simple box with very little geometry on it. But when I project I get this result. Where is my mistake?

SelwynPhillips

Hey there, welcome to polycount. From what I can see it looks like your low poly is just one smoothing group. Just a simple Auto smooth should fix that. Each section of your low poly model has sharp 90 degree corners. these need to be broken into separate UV shells in your UV map. That should fix these errors.

Illu

Thank you for your reply, it helped me a lot. I was able to take it further. Baking seems to be my weak spot, but I am getting slowly the hang of it

gnoop

You still have it wrong based on your picture.    Make vertex normals  parallel on each side of the cube  with a bit of surface slant.    Or just do more splits.     Those diagonal shading gradients would never be 100% perfectly compensated in a game engine

Illu

Thank you for your reply, I checked my normals and i think they look fine. The gradient comes from Marmorset and my light setup, it is very unflattering now that i think about it. I will test to bring it into unreal in the future to check if it looks good.

ZacD

If you have hard edges, you need a UV split along those hard edges. 

Eric Chadwick

This page might help you
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking