Baking and handling normal artifact

bitinn

I am trying to understand what might have cause my issue with seams on baked textures (in particular, normal map).

I have a high-poly and 2 low-poly approximate:






I am trying to determine which low-poly works better (aka result in better bake)

But both of them are flawed in some way (show apparent seams or artifact):




What I have checked:

- Make sure low-poly model encloses the high-poly one.
- Make sure low-poly model use soft edge as much as possible.
- Make sure models are positioned correctly.

I just need some suggestions on what may cause these issues, I am using Maya and Substance Painter, but I don't think my issue is tool specific.

Thank you in advance.

Obscura

On the last picture it looks like its a lack of dilation + bending UV but hard to tell without seeing the normal map.

bitinn

@Obscura

Do you need the full UV and normal map to determine the issue? I will use screenshots for now.

Also uploading my test high-poly and low-poly fbx in case it's helpful.






(EDIT: just tried changing the dilation width in SP from 1 to higher value, don't think it's the issue as it doesn't seem to affect baking result)

Obscura

Dilation should be infinite or at least a few pixels wide. When the texture is viewed on the mesh from further, it will get lower resolution (mip map) and it will bleed around the seams if you don't have wide padding. But this error that you have looks more like the uvs are too close to each other, and they bleed onto each other. You can see that those greenish lines are coming from an another part of the mesh. So use a bit more space and use more dilation. This should fix it.

bitinn

Obscura said:

Dilation should be infinite or at least a few pixels wide. When the texture is viewed on the mesh from further, it will get lower resolution (mip map) and it will bleed around the seams if you don't have wide padding. But this error that you have looks more like the uvs are too close to each other, and they bleed onto each other. You can see that those greenish lines are coming from an another part of the mesh. So use a bit more space and use more dilation. This should fix it.

You are right, this solves the issue. Thx!



Just to note that the dilation here is the padding between UV shells, I have to set it to around 8px (assuming a 2K texture map). And SP by default will export textures with infinite dilation for reasons mentioned above.