Baking high poly to low poly leaves artifacts?

Elarionus

I'm having some trouble right now, trying to get my high poly to bake down to my low poly. I've tried multiple different frontal and rear distances, but no matter what, I always get these weird artifacting seams going around the mesh. Here's a screenshot of the low poly and high poly (after baking).

Bek

Your lowpoly model is entirely hard edged. Look into vertex normals, hard/soft edges, smoothing groups if you use max, and maybe some baking tutorials while you're at it. Tech talk / polycount wiki has plenty of info. Good luck.

guitarguy00

From what I understand every UV shell has to have it's own smoothing group. Also every acute angle(something like 70 degrees or higher) should be broken/split. It looks like you have smoothing groups applied to every face on the low poly here. You are using Max so a quick way to fix this or to at least see if it is the problem is to download Textools for Max and then use the option "apply smoothing groups to UV shells" and bake again. This is not always the ideal approach but it will quickly tell you if this is the problem at hand. Also on export make sure 'smoothing groups' is ticked.

Mink

It'd try to make your high poly a lot less different from your low poly then it is. At the end of the day normal maps can only do so much. You might want to start working with bevels as opposed to subsurfacce when you're making hardsurface models for this reason.

R3D

Set only your UV border edges to hard edge, that should solve the artifact issues you're getting. Check out the hard edge section of this page https://www.marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/?page=Best Results#bestresults