Normal Map baking (Maya) Making edges appear in normal maps.

muddymink

Hello! I'm very new to creating normal maps, and I've run into a strange problem that I can't seem to fix... When I bake and create my normal map for my low poly mesh, the baking process seems to take the low poly edges into consideration, as well as the high poly resolution.

I suppose it's easier to explain through pictures.




You can really see it when you look at the output normal maps...



It looks like it is taking the high res and low res information...
Here's what my "Transfer maps" output looks liek right before I hit Bake. 



I only have the Low poly mesh selected for "target mesh", and only the high poly selected for "source mesh". If anyone can help me fix this, I would really appreciate it, thank you

(Sorry if my terminology is wrong, I'm still new to normal maps :P )

Axi5

Your mesh probably has hard edges everywhere, smooth them out in Mesh Display > Soften Edge then do a rebake

muddymink

Oh wow! That worked wonders, thank you very much!

Axi5

Do you have another image so we can check it's all good?

muddymink

Here he is, the head normal maps came out great after some tweaking! Thanks a ton!
I threw his texture on as well, he's not completely done, but he's coming along!



I am running into a very weird issue again though, when I try to bake the body normals. the map comes out looking VERY grainny.




I do have UV's overlapping with this mesh, so I wonder if that is causing the issue? And for some reason, when I re-bake, it gets worse every time. I have no idea what this problem could be...

Here's my output before baking, it's very similar to before!

ActionDawg

Firstly, and I know it's not an answer to your questions, but if you don't have a specific need to bake in Maya, don't. Use xNormal or Substance or Marmoset or whatever. Something dedicated to doing the job. You'll get higher quality results that are actually synced to modern game and rendering engines, with less guesswork.

As for overlapping UVs: Offset the duplicate islands outside of the UV space by 1 unit. This way they still lie over the same part of the texture and can pick up texture info but do not bake any information.

Check out the Toolbag baking guide for info on baking theory and how the general process should go: https://www.marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/
This should be all you need for understanding how to produce a correct normal map every time. Naturally, Joe uses Toolbag for the guide but the information is program agnostic.

muddymink

Oh wow! Thank you! I will look into this! I've needed some good tutorials for awhile XP Thank you!