xNormal - Bake artifacts and visible seams in normal map

StellarBE

Hi all,

I'm having some difficulties baking a normal map in xNormal for my tree that I sculpted in Zbrush. Here's an image of the artifacts and seams that I'm getting:



As you can see there are these dark grey artifacts and visible seams where my UV's are cut.

I used Zbrush's UV Master by splitting the tree into polygroups. Then before exporting the HI-Poly and Low-poly out of Zbrush I made the model into one polygroup again by going tools -> polygroups -> GroupVisible.

In xNormal I tried all kinds of settings like average normals, different bucket sizes, different padding sizes, all anti-aliasing settings. Nothing works, I keep getting these artifacts and seams in the normal map.

What I haven't tried is using a cage to bake. Would you think this might help?

What does a cage do? And how would you create a cage in maya?

Any help is much appriciated!

Thanks,

Stefan

StellarBE

Ok I managed to fix the dark grey artifacts by running the "ray distances calculator" tool inside xNormal.

But the seams are still there...

Any help please?

Thanks

ZacD

First, you probably shouldn't uniquely bake a tree. Tiling textures should be all that you need. 

Second, create a cage by duplicating the low poly and using a push deformer to make sure the cage barely but completely contains the highpoly. You don't need to use a push deformer specifically, you could manually move each vert if you wanted.

Lastly, some normal map seams may be visible unless you are using a sync'd normal map work flow.