How To Bake a Vine-Like Curved Mesh's Normal Maps? - Solved!

SheWhoKnocked

Hello, 
I am attempting to bake down a curved high poly vine/root mesh but am getting very bad results. I have tried the bake in x-normal and Substance Painter. I have also tried to use a cage but am still receiving the same results as before. I own Z-brush core and am unable to bake in z-brush itself which i feel would be the easiest option. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated!

Alex_J

I'm not very experienced with xNormal or substance baking, so I can't tell you specifically which buttons to push, but it looks like an issue with your cage and/or search distance.

On the length of the vine you aren't grabbing the details, but at that intersecting point you are grabbing from the wrong vine. This is a pretty common issue most beginners face and if somebody doesn't give you a more specific answer I am sure you can find it by searching these forums for "baking issues."

Besides adjusting your search distances, you might want to separate the smaller vines from the larger one they intersect with for the normal map bake, and only keep them together for the AO bake. You can separate them by name in substance painter, rather than actually moving them.

SheWhoKnocked

Thank you. I have the vines separated out and am working with them individually while I try and solve the problem. I'm not used to baking with cages but have been able to get slightly better results. I'm still unable to get the bake to grab the full details however. I will check the forums like you suggested though! 

musashidan

Number 1 piece of advice.....don't bake in Zbrush. It uses its own native tangent space and the quality is inferior.

Number 2 piece of advice.....don't bake this at all.

A much better way is to create a tiling vine pattern normal map and map your vines tiling vertically. The added benefit is that you have infinite uv space and are not bound by low texel density in 0-1.

SheWhoKnocked

I had considered this but I wanted to achieve a twining effect that I am unsure of how to do in a tilling material. I guess if I created it on an angle it would give the appearance of wrapping around the object. Definitely something to look into, thanks. 

SheWhoKnocked

Thanks to everyone who looked this over, I figured out the problem and have been able to fix it! I have also made a tilling material per musashidan's suggestion and i will be playing around with that!