Goofy Visual Scaling Issue When Baking Normals

brettmarshalltucker

Hey guys!

I recently made the switch from Blender to Maya LT so I've been in a constant purgatory of technical issues for the past few days. I'm pretty experienced with Substance Painter so I didn't expect to run into issues there but here we are. When I try to bake a normal map from my high poly mesh created in ZBrush, I get this goofy looking scaling of the UV on top of my low poly mesh. This is also my first time using a cage because the normal map was giving me a black image every time I tried to bake without one. Here are things that I have tried/made sure to do:

1. Transformations for the cage and low poly mesh are "frozen" in Maya.
2. High poly mesh was adjusted to a scale of 1 with zeroed out transformations.
3. Adjusting sizes of the texture set and baking output maps in Painter.
4. Using a fbx and obj created in Zbrush.
5. Checking and adjusting basically everything in the Normal bake parameters in Painter even if I know it has nothing to do with that.

I would love to port the high poly mesh over to Maya and then export the fbx that way to ensure that the mesh is, in fact, centered on top of the low poly and so that I could freeze its transformations but Maya has that annoying 100k poly export limit.

As you can see, my high poly normals are showing up and look great, minus the fact that they're a quarter of the size they should be. Any ideas what's going on here? Thanks in advance!

BMT

brettmarshalltucker

I'm thinking it has to be an issue with world space/scaling in ZBrush but I'm not sure how to ensure they match up if not exported from Maya.

NoRank

Didn't know that maya had this limit. Try to export it from blender then and see if it fixes. If it is, then i'm pretty sure there are workarounds available for doing this scalling stuff in zbrush.

Froyok

brettmarshalltucker said:

When I try to bake a normal map from my high poly mesh created in ZBrush, I get this goofy looking scaling of the UV on top of my low poly mesh.

Well, usually a black image when baking if you have matching by name enabled means the low poly and high-poly mesh didn't match at all. If you import the high and low poly mesh together in the same Maya LT scene, do they overlap properly ? Do they share the same naming convention ?

brettmarshalltucker

NoRank said:

Didn't know that maya had this limit. Try to export it from blender then and see if it fixes. If it is, then i'm pretty sure there are workarounds available for doing this scalling stuff in zbrush.

Froyok said:

brettmarshalltucker said:

When I try to bake a normal map from my high poly mesh created in ZBrush, I get this goofy looking scaling of the UV on top of my low poly mesh.

Well, usually a black image when baking if you have matching by name enabled means the low poly and high-poly mesh didn't match at all. If you import the high and low poly mesh together in the same Maya LT scene, do they overlap properly ? Do they share the same naming convention ?

Sorry for the late response! I should have updated this post because I figured out the issue that same night. Maya LT has a polygon limit for exports but Maya 2017 does not. I have the student version of both so I just imported them both into Maya 2017 and exported after freezing transforms. The meshes did line up correctly but the fact that I couldn't export the fbx from Maya LT was tripping me up, even though the fbx imported from ZBrushed shared the same world space with the low poly model. A strange issue indeed but resolved with just checking all my bases. Thanks for the help!