Insoluble normal map seams - I tryed in every software

olaveiras

Guys, i've been exploring possibilities to bake normal maps with hard surfaces. I read all main topics about in polycount and I'm actually feeling bad to open one more topic about this issue, but I'm on this for +2weeks and I tryed everything possible (combinations between average/explicit, cage/noCage, smoothing angles and hard edges, in XNormal, Marmoset and Substance Painter), but I keep getting this seams. I really don't know what to try aymore.
I attached the cage, low and hi models and the wrong bake I got, in case anyone is interested.

SenSayNyu

It looks normal for me given the resolution and uv layout. You can straighten uv islands for more efficient uv packing and reduce resolution based errors such as this. However, one thing I've learned long time ago - you don't poke your nose at assets searching for imperfections all day in marmoset. Always keep in mind how much screen space your asset will take, and make informed decisions.

Brandon.LaFrance

I tried baking your model in Substance Painter. With the default settings, bakes came out clean with no cage, but using your cage introduced the errors that are in your screenshot. It looks like your cage is identical to the low poly mesh. Cages are used to limit the distance the rays are cast, and should completely enclose the high resolution mesh. Because your low res and cage are identical, you're effectively casting rays of zero distance, which causes problems. By inflating your cage to fully enclose the high res, I was able to get clean results. With a mesh as simple as this, a cage isn't really necessary, and simply adjusting ray distance settings in your baker should get you good results.

Obscura

Maybe its just a display error. Do you have the tangent space set to "Mikk"?

olaveiras

First of all, thanks to you all for your responses.
@SenSayNyu I tried your idea, but the result stays the same. But your point about perfection is interesting. I decided to defy myself because I see so many examples and step-by-step guiding many people to bake a really clean map... I'm starting to think there's no bake 100% good.

@Brandon.LaFrance It was really unfortunate, I uploaded the wrong cage. I was really tired and pissed off yesterday, and didn't take real care when I posted the files.

@Obscura I tried this option too, but the small semas didn't disappeared.

I had many other objects with complex cases, but I'm gonna try by myself. I just posted this case because is a simple example and I didn't know where to dig deeper. My conclusion: perfect bake is not possible for now hahahaha

Brandon.LaFrance

Perfect bake is entirely possible. Maybe I was not clear in my post. In Substance Painter, simply baking without a cage, using default bake settings, produced clean bakes. Modifying your cage to fully enclose the high res also produced clean bakes. All with no other modifications to the high and low meshes that you provided.

SenSayNyu

But if you zoom close enough to the sharp corner as OP did you will see seams. My point was, that is acceptable because in real game players will not look that close to notice.

poopipe

If you're close enough for the seam to be an issue you're close enough to need a bevel. 

Udjani

From other topic, i believe the problem is the same.

''metalliandy said: It looks like a texture filtering issue, which unfortunately is not fixable by artists. You will always get these problems when camera is so close to the corner like that even when everything is perfectly synced.

In the screenshot below you can see a similar error even when an OS normal map is applied (OS normals totally ignore the vertex normals of the underlying low poly mesh so errors from vertex normal issues are impossible) so it would be best to just live with it and move the camera further away. You will never see these seams under normal circumstances.


Hope that helps ''

huffer

It's normal and acceptable (no one will see it, and it doesn't even matter compared to awful normal map compression in the game engine). But if you're baking something super low poly and low res and the client asks you to remove the seams, bake it in Maya.

olaveiras

Thanks you all for your efforts. My conclusion is that these errors are acceptable. If not, or I should change my model if such imperfection is a issue (increase bevels like @poopipe said) or I have to fix it manually.

Anyways, I'm really grateful. Your points of view really helped me a lot.

musashidan

olaveiras said:

 My conclusion is that these errors are acceptable.

These are not errors. Remember, you're trying to project the illusion of a beautiful, smooth curved surface onto an impossibly sharp 90 degree corner. This illusion(like all tricks) falls apart under close scrutiny. The viewing angle/distance is what hides the trickery. When your material/textures are applied and you're viewing from a reasonable distance, this will barely be noticeable.