Is this a Good Normal Map

Chidambhar_Swaroop

Hello Polycounter's

I recently baked this Normal Map from a High Poly to Low Poly... Is this a good Normal Map ?? Why I got a doubt is because it has too many color variation in some parts.... Any help where I could understand "The Perfect Normal Map"  Plz....

Elithenia

The colours denote which way it goes.
How does it look on your model?

Chidambhar_Swaroop

@Elithenia looks excellent on my low poly model... but few of my seniors were like "If you have too much of color variation it means, your normal map is not good.  That's why I asked here, lol 

Zalek4

It would be easier to help you if we could see the map on the model if that's possible.

EarthQuake

Chidambhar_Swaroop said:

@Elithenia looks excellent on my low poly model... but few of my seniors were like "If you have too much of color variation it means, your normal map is not good.  That's why I asked here, lol 

This is nonsense, it sounds like your seniors are parroting some "rule" that they do not understand. Nobody can tell from looking at your normal map in 2D, aside from very egregious problems like ray cast fails, whether your bake is good. You check on the 3D model, in your target renderer. 

Colors in the normal map represent specific angles, there are no colors that are inherently bad.

Elithenia

As @EarthQuake says. The colours just denotes angles. And if it looks good on your model it is fine. That is all that matters.

Zalek4

That was the impression I was under as well. Wasn't sure if you had any specific areas you were questioning, which is why I asked.

Neox

EarthQuake said:

Chidambhar_Swaroop said:

@Elithenia looks excellent on my low poly model... but few of my seniors were like "If you have too much of color variation it means, your normal map is not good.  That's why I asked here, lol 

This is nonsense, it sounds like your seniors are parroting some "rule" that they do not understand. Nobody can tell from looking at your normal map in 2D, aside from very egregious problems like ray cast fails, whether your bake is good. You check on the 3D model, in your target renderer. 

Colors in the normal map represent specific angles, there are no colors that are inherently bad.

i guess they speak about gradients when they parrot this rule. and it's somewhat true strong gradients are something to avoid. in uncompressed state they are perfectly fine, in 16bit even more so. But compressed 8bit gradients turn your nice looking model into shit.

however, at first glance this normalmap looks just fine, show it on your object

Elithenia

Also which program did you use to bake it with?

Chidambhar_Swaroop

@Zalek4 I will show it... Right now I am away from my PC (Trip)...

@EarthQuake hahaha... I think ur right....

@Neox Ohhh I didn't know that... Learnt something new... Thanks

@Elithenia I used Xnormal... 

I found this PDF in an older post here in polycount itself which I think it will be useful to me to learn more abt normal map baking - http://polycount.com/discussion/146667/a-practical-guide-on-normal-mapping-for-games/p1

poopipe

I disagree,  you can tell a fair bit from a normal map by looking at it. 

Gradients can mean flat areas and shapes like cylinders won't work well when lodded and they are prone to compression artefacts. On organic surfaces, strong colour variation in the map can indicate significant differences between the high and low res meshes which is often undesirable - so while parroting is possible  there may be some validity to the arguments. 

As said above  though,  it's entirely dependent on the use case and what really matters is the way it looks on the model

What I would suggest is to straighten shells wherever possible - wobbly/angled edges are more prone to artefacts associated with aliasing and compression and they also take up more space on your page. 

Kyetja

It honestly looks fine, I assume that the weird colors on the edges of areas are just padding, so check if they look fine on your model, also try a lower res version and LOD's (if you use those) to make sure those padded areas never show up.