How should I go about baking this High Poly Model onto a Low Poly? (images inside)

Irraka

I'm using substance painter to bake the high poly onto the low poly but I'm trying to get all the detail inside. When I tried it this way it looks bad.....

So I was just curious how you guys might go about turning this high poly model into a smaller one? Should I hollow out the center? Should I bake the middle prongs and the rest of the model separate?

Obscura

Just insert a single vertex into the center. You could have the spider web looking topology there, no problem. It will improve the ray direction and catch the center details better.

Explanation of why does this work:
https://polycount.com/discussion/147227/skew-you-buddy-making-sense-of-skewed-normal-map-details/p1

poly_troubleshoot

I would like to see the final result. I'm moderately certain as to what the issue is. Normal maps do not simulate depth. They simulate the direction at which light bounces off the surface. If you want the player to see the depth then you will need to extrude your shape inward and model the 5 cylinders as separate low polys.

Irraka

It worked! Mostly A lot of the pieces turned out good. Thanks for the advice Obscura. I ended up using a cage file.

 It did create a different problem though.




Two pieces still look kinda low rez.

 I will go back and mess around with low rez pegs for these two objects.

Though now the biggest issue is the speaker.


and yes the low and high are both stacked on each other. I just pulled them aside to show you what they looked like.

Obscura

I believe the issue with the speaker is because you have creases / hard edges on the high poly and when you import it into painter it gets fully smoothed out so the shading gets messed up. Its hard to see from your image but it kinda looks like you have used booleans and there are ngons all over the place. So make sure you preserve the smoothing setup at exporting, and importing into painter too. As for the other 2 problems, you can see that those details looks "blocky". This is because of the resolution limitation. You can see the pixels. So you can either increase the texture resolution of those pieces, or if they sit in an atlas uv, you could give them more texel density by scaling them up somewhat on the uvmap.

Irraka

So I'm an idiot I should have deleted that boolean speaker because I had a Zmeshed speaker inside it. Either way I fixed it.

Kanni3d

@Irraka
neat stuff, and decent bake results. I'd definitely go with what @poly_troubleshoot was going on about, normal maps can only do so much - you have such an extreme depth discrepancy with your low res vs high res. Just extrude that face in the low res in a bit, keep the vertex in the middle to fight skewing, and you'll get a much better result! 

Irraka

I just wanted to give a update for you guys. Thanks for all the help. Here is the finished product! 

Irraka