Baking normals from mesh with custom normals causing issues
interpolator
I finally had my first chance to try the TB3 baker.
Have to say I really like the workflow and the results, it only seems to have an issue with custom normals.
In a very simple test I baked a beveled cube with custom normals onto itself. There should be no normal information but the edges show a slight difference.
I tried with and without smoothed cage, same result.
Rendering of the custom normals is perfectly fine, you can see both in the screenshot.
Am I missing something in the settings maybe?
Besides that issue, is there a way to adjust the ray length for ambient occlusion (baking)?
Are there plans to have other output formats besides psd in the future?
Have to say I really like the workflow and the results, it only seems to have an issue with custom normals.
In a very simple test I baked a beveled cube with custom normals onto itself. There should be no normal information but the edges show a slight difference.
I tried with and without smoothed cage, same result.
Rendering of the custom normals is perfectly fine, you can see both in the screenshot.
Am I missing something in the settings maybe?
Besides that issue, is there a way to adjust the ray length for ambient occlusion (baking)?
Are there plans to have other output formats besides psd in the future?
Replies
Baking a normal map onto a mesh such as this certainly should result in normal information, while the vertex normals have been set to face normals for the larger faces, the actual shading gets pushed to the smaller bevel faces, so you would expect to see normal data there in the normal map. I'm surprised the normal data isn't more visible.
The mesh on the right side is the mesh without any normal map, only custom normals. I added it to the screenshot to show that it renders completely fine. For the test I duplicated it and baked the normal map from the duplication onto the original, there should not be any shading in the map.
I just chose the cube to keep it simple for testing.
Ambient occlusion produces some unexpected result as well.
The normals look like this, nothing special.
Also, if you can send me this scene + your mesh we will debug it.
I doubt that the workflow itself is used by anyone but me, though if there is a general issue regarding custom normals and baking, it might be a problem for different workflows as well. If it is not baking correctly from itself it will not give an accurate result if you use a highpoly model.
Just for information, it does bake correctly in Substance and Blender, haven't tried xnormal yet.
I will check later if the export settings for fbx make any difference, though usually if there is a problem, the mesh will not be rendered correctly in the first place.
This is the first time I try to excessively utilise custom normals and created this workflow:
1. create low/mid-poly mesh with custom normals, the realtime model finally used in engine
2. duplicate realtime model and add details, high-poly model
3. create subd details
4. bake high-poly model and subd details onto the realtime model.
you can see it in my current WIP http://polycount.com/discussion/188333/macross-destroid-defender-battletech-rifleman-wip#latest
Thanks again for the support!