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xNormal - Bake artifacts and visible seams in normal map

StellarBE
polycounter lvl 6
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StellarBE polycounter lvl 6
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

Replies

  • StellarBE
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    StellarBE polycounter lvl 6
    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
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    ZacD ngon master
    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. 
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