Cylinder baking issue. Anyway to fix this?

Ken Bock

If you look below you'll see the issue I'm dealing with. I'm working with a model that has a lot of cylinders and I'm running into this baking issue so I did this quick test study to figure it out.

Its a Low poly cylinder with 12 sides and I'm trying to bake down a high poly cylinder with 24 sides and the bottom and top edges with a bevel to them in substance painter. And this is the result I'm getting. I've tried working with the vertex normals, adding a bevel at the edges or just additional support loops and I still get this. What little I could find searching the web on this is there is no way to fix it. Other then just upping the low poly's geometry.

Does anyone know of any options? The only option I haven't tried yet was to go in and fix the errors of the normal map manually. But from what I also read is the baker is doing exactly as it should to get this result and if I adjusted them manually it would still only look good from one angle.


Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

Bek

If you don't want to use extra geo, I suppose you could bake from a duplicate of the lowpoly that has bevels/loops, which would avoid the skewing but wouldn't look 'round' on the top/bottom. Also I'd be using split edges at the top/bottom edge loops to reduce the gradients in the lowpoly normals.

Ken Bock

@Bek Thanks so much for the advice. Forgot about adding the edgeloops to help cut down on the gradients in the middle. And adding additional support loops at the edges on the top and bottom do help clean it up to a certain extent.

Bek

You don't necessarily need to add edge loops to reduce the gradient in this case, you need to use appropriate smoothing groups / vertex normals. If you don't know why hard edges by uv boundaries are common, check this thread