A little help to get a normal map to look just right ?

OmegaRidley

Hey there !

I'm completely new here as well as to 3D in general, so I hope I'm posting this to the right section of the forums. I also hope my questions don't sound insultingly amateurish. 

So, I've decided to model a small stone staircase for training purposes. I started by making a lowpoly model in 3DS Max, then imported it into Zbrush and started detailing it. This is what they looked like : 


I then did my UVs, and proceeded to bake my Normal and AO maps, which you can find here : 


And finally, I uploaded the whole thing to Sketchfab, where I noticed some problems around some of my edges, as well as my stairs looking all ugly.


Friend told me my edges were set to "hard" instead of "soft", so I opened up Maya and softened them up, but now my lowpoly looks ugly as sin and even the Normal Map doesn't fix the problem : 


I'm kind of at a loss here, so could anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong and help me get it right, please ? And maybe also tell me how to soften up edges in 3DS max ? I'd like to eliminate Maya from my workflow. 

Snakes

Hi, cool steps! From my experience this issue can happen for a number of reasons, which is why baking can be so challenging. It would help if you showed us the toplogy, as well as a checker material on the steps. Two common reasons for this occurring are very stretched UVs or the topology isn't dense enough. So I'd make sure the UVs aren't stretched and also add some loops around areas of the mesh, specifically edges. (since it looks like your mesh doesn't have much topo). Hope that helps man, good luck.
Baking can be a real pain but you'll get the hang of it with trail and error practice!  

OmegaRidley

Hey, thanks ! 

I was unable to find a way to turn on the checker in the UV preview, but the topology is rather simple (which is probably the real issue) and nothing seems stretched to me. I've made an archive with both my high and low poly meshes here, maybe they'll be helpful : https://www.dropbox.com/s/edonupvrqz2qh8s/Stair_meshes.rar?dl=0

Thanks for your reply !

Snakes

I probably should have asked what you used to bake. I just did a quick bake in Knald and it seemed the bake worked perfectly fine. So it would seem like your bake was the issue. If its the bake causing the problem it means your baking cage is either too small or too big probably. Knald has a slider for it but whatever you're using might not. I actually haven't got any experience with Xnormal which is bad on my behalf but Knald is just a ton better. 

Here is what the bake looks like inside of Knald!  Looks pretty okay right? 


Here is the texture map, Its actually not the same one from the screenshot above, I realised I did a 4k map and it was taking forever to upload to the site so I did a 2k map instead, quality is a little worse. 



As you can see the edge was smoothed out, I think that was because I turned on Anti-Aliasing (16xAA) on the bake, I've noticed AA helps a lot with baking edges. 


So in this picture you can see all these little artifacts where the edges are, this is happening because you haven't smoothed the edge normals on the model. Doing that will fix these issues on any edges.  


Hope that sort of helps, at least you know its the bake itself causing you the main issue. 

OmegaRidley

Oh, you're right, I should have mentioned my baking tools, sorry ! I used Substance Designer in this case, tho I've also used xNormal and 3DS Max in the past. I'm going to keep experimenting with baking until I get it right. Thank you for all your help so far ! 

Travis C

hi, to avoid normal map errors, here's some general guidelines: for your lowpoly model, first make sure it is triangulated. then in maya soften all the edges. then if there is like an angle that is over 70  degrees or over (not sure the exact amount of degrees), make sure you split those UVs and harden those edges. Or you could always bevel it instead if you want to avoid doing that. but basically just soften everything and then harden all border edges of uvs. usually that will fix them.