Normal Baking problems

Elzean

I have an issue when i bake, i tried with Substance Painter and XNormal. Here are both my high and low poly:



also tried with a bit higher resolution model which helps with some artefacts i had but there is still some:



and here is the issue:




I tried to modify the rear / frontal distance a lot but i couldn't get rid of this no matter what. I also tried to make a cage file but i had even more issues, i must be doing something wrong

Should i change my low poly geometry in some ways ?

pior

The edge distribution of your lowpoly barely matches any of the features of your high. Of course there is a always a bit of wiggle room when it comes to that sort of stuff, but here the issues are piling up : the less your low matches your high, the more artefacts/intersections errors you are going to get.



In other words : you're not having any issues with normal baking - baking is having issues with the way you built your lowpoly

Elzean

Yes so i need to change my low poly, is what you draw over what you mean by following my high poly more ? Do i need to worry about triangles for static objects as this ? (i often have issues connecting poligons at some point when doing the low poly)

pior

Elzean said:

is what you draw over what you mean by following my high poly more ?

Hello -

I recommended you to make your lowpoly match the features of your highpoly more accurately, and drew a paintover showing you how to do exactly that.

Also, why would you "worry about triangles" ? Please explain the rationale that makes you believe that.

Lastly, if you current lowpoly creation workflow is problematic when it comes to connecting verts, you need to re-evaluate your lowpoly modeling toolset and adress this limitation before worrying about baking.

Good luck !

NoRank

No need to worry for triangles on this kind of model. Still it can be your uvs (Well I don't actually think it is but I would check if there is no overlapping pieces) or your cage. I'm used to bake stuff cageless, just by checking the average normals option (sure enough when you do this you have some other stuffs to worry but for this piece It would be no problem). Try to see if the average normals helps you out and again, play around with your front and rear distance

Elzean

Also, why would you "worry about triangles" ? Please explain the rationale that makes you believe that.

Just considering my lack of knowledge in modeling in general i prefer asking about it. The reason is that i was teach to avoid it for characters/animated models to avoid problems with animations, i understand those are not an issue for static ones but who knows i prefer not assume stuff that i don't know

NoRank said:

No need to worry for triangles on this kind of model. Still it can be your uvs (Well I don't actually think it is but I would check if there is no overlapping pieces) or your cage. I'm used to bake stuff cageless, just by checking the average normals option (sure enough when you do this you have some other stuffs to worry but for this piece It would be no problem). Try to see if the average normals helps you out and again, play around with your front and rear distance

Yes i dont have overlaps in the UVs and i think i already use the "average normals" option.

Thanks for the help guys i will try to redo the low poly and follow its shape better.

Neox

triangles are also perfectly fine on characters. whoever taught you, ask that person why.
there are good reasons for using quads, and bad siturations for triangles. but triangles have their worth.
just forbidding them is a pretty poor approach.
Especially considering that in games every asset is triangulated in engine anyways.

the lowpoly matching your highpoly is one part of the problem, but whats causing those artifacts is most likely too big of a cage or too long ray search distance.

pior

Heya -

Indeed, good of you to ask. The reason why I asked you why you were making such an assumption is because putting clear words on why one believes a certain thing helps identifying where such a belief is coming from. Bit of a socratic dialogue so to speak.

Elzean said:

The reason is that i was teach to avoid it for characters/animated models to avoid problems with animations [...]

The problem is that whoever taught you that was 100% incorrect (either the teacher was incorrect, or you misunderstood what was said). Imagine the following : A perfectly quad-based cylinder, and then same cylinder with all its edges triangulated. These two models would deform and animate *exactly* the same way ; and as a matter of fact, the triangulated one is the one that actually ends up in the game anyways.

Now, randomly placed triangles do deform badly - but so do randomly placed quads. Of course selecting sections of a quad-based model is always nice and easy because all 3d programs allow you to do loop selections, and without a doubt the person in charge of skin weighting the model will appreciate being able to make such selections easily. But this has nothing to do with deformations during animations. If the person weighting the model insists on having a quad based model to work with, you can always give that a person a proxy model to pre-rig and transfer the weights from. As a matter of fact, unless you have a guarantee that your engine triangulates things exactly the same as your baker (which is extremely rare) you *do* need to triangulate before baking and final export anyways. One cannot sacrifice accuracy and clean bakes just for sake of a minor inconvenience in the pipeline - this kind of stuff backfires very fast, especially on hard surface models.

Now I am not saying that quads are bad or anything of the sort. But the reality is that what seemed to be a benign misunderstanding on your end or your teachers led you to create an inappropriate model - and in turn this had consequences on your baking. Everything is connected !

Elzean said:

Thanks for the help guys i will try to redo the low poly and follow its shape better.

There is no try Thankfully enough rebuilding the model as I indicated is pretty much a 5 minutes job.

Elzean

I wouldn't blame the guy who were teaching us, he had to fit lots of knowledge in few hours of course (3d was not really a major part of our program) also it was like 10-15 years ago but somehow that idea of avoiding triangles stayed (i don't think he completely forbid it, just suggest to avoid it when possible) i remember him showing joints for knees or elbow. But that's as much i can remember XD

There is no try  Thankfully enough rebuilding the model as I indicated is pretty much a 5 minutes job.

Ha i wish i was that fast... I'm using blender i tried Retopoflow but had a few issues with it (might try again). Otherwise i use blender magnet to surface and "F2" (https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/F2)

But i'm nowhere as near as 5 minutes to do retopo may be one day 

pior

Well, for what it's worth ... Blender, snap to surface and F2 is exactly what I use too You could get there a little bit faster using a dedicated retopo environment like Topogun but indeed for something as simple as this piece there is no need for that.

Elzean

Hey so it took me a while to make the new low poly, though its not that low but its ok at least i have no more issue. Those are suppose to fall down from the sky at night and some sort of dark energy comes out and spawn monsters, player has to destroy it to stop the spawning. Just to be clear about those pictures, most models comes from pack, i only do models (like the one in my profile pic and this current one) when i can't find an existing one that fit   Here is the result in game




Thanks again for the help!