Artifacting When Baking Normal Map On Low Res Mesh
polycounter lvl 4
Hello,
I come from a film background and recently have started learning game art and doing low poly model normals. Below is a bake I did in Substance Painter using my low poly mesh and high poly sculpt. I was informed that I should be using all soft normals after I got artifacts on corners due to hard edge normals:
All the normals are soft in the model above, which makes sense why there's this black "leak" as light tries to wrap around. Then I tried to add more geo and do another bake:
The normal map output was identical in both situation, but the quality was very nice. So what I learned is that clearly the issue is the low res is too low? The only thing I did was add more loops. I did not change the overall shape or alter UVs at all. If possible I would like to not add any unnecessary geometry to keep the poly count as low as possible.
As I am still learning I would love any assistance with this that I can get. I have attempted to render using xNormal as well but unfortunately it also caused issues as it seems the geo is the problem most likely.
Thank you very much!
I come from a film background and recently have started learning game art and doing low poly model normals. Below is a bake I did in Substance Painter using my low poly mesh and high poly sculpt. I was informed that I should be using all soft normals after I got artifacts on corners due to hard edge normals:
All the normals are soft in the model above, which makes sense why there's this black "leak" as light tries to wrap around. Then I tried to add more geo and do another bake:
The normal map output was identical in both situation, but the quality was very nice. So what I learned is that clearly the issue is the low res is too low? The only thing I did was add more loops. I did not change the overall shape or alter UVs at all. If possible I would like to not add any unnecessary geometry to keep the poly count as low as possible.
As I am still learning I would love any assistance with this that I can get. I have attempted to render using xNormal as well but unfortunately it also caused issues as it seems the geo is the problem most likely.
Thank you very much!