cant get perfect bakes on hardsurface

RadicalDrim

hey guys, i have some experience baking objects that i sculpt and after that i do a retopology and bake... but with hardsurface my workflow doesnt work to well, ive created a low poly gun model, and after that the high poly but when i do the bake in xnormal it looks garbage and i think the problem is the smoothing groups, if i bake with the exported smooth group it looks quite ok, but not perfect, but if i use average normals it looks completely bad, how do i fix that?  thanks for the help guys

Kert

You must to see it video https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/creating-props-for-games-vol-1
Shortly, your low poly model should be located close to high poly and on the 90 degree angles or less you should put hard edges and cut uv in this place, all other edges should be soft. 

throttlekitty

Hi, what are you showing in the first image, is that you lowpoly?

First, I highly suggest reading through this stickied thread.

In general, use soft/hard edges instead of average normals, set them to face and start over. You can run a Set Normal Angle to quickly set your smoothness, then manually tweak the rest as needed. Your UV splits should happen at hard edges and separated from each other slightly for some pixel padding.

RadicalDrim

Thank you guys for the help, but im confused where i should put hard edges, on the edges and cavities? the links were very helpful!

Mark Dygert

It really depends on how you are baking, with or without a cage?

Try baking without any hard edges on your low poly mesh. It will look bad without a normal map, but that shading gets replaced by the normal map so don't worry about how the low poly shades without it.

RadicalDrim

im baking with a cage, well the problem was the uvs, and little bit of the smoothing groups, fixed with you guys help, thanks a lot!