[Solved] I can't figure out why my bake is not working.

Nokdef

Greetings everyone! I'm a programmer and I've been trying to learn 3D for about a week now, I have been following a tutorial but I'm stuck at the baking part. 

For some reason I can't bake this mesh, only one part of the mesh gets skewed, and I'm struggling to figure out why. 


Everything else is baking smoothly, and after 2 days of research with no success, I decided to directly ask for help.

I have tried to separate the ornaments from the main body of the pillar, with no success. I'm using XNormals to do my baking, and I also noticed that substance painter refuses to bake by mesh name, it fails to load the highpoly mesh. 

I have also included my low poly, high poly and cage files in a mediafire link, for closer inspection if any of you want to take a look. 

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

wirrexx

Give me 10, i'll try it out for you.

Udjani

Edit: wirrexx made a very big answare for me to hiajck it. But still some tips that will help you.

1. Use FBX with painter, obj is shit they say.
2. For the love of existence, decimate the highpoly before exporting it to bake xD. It will take much less time to import/export and bake.
3. When baking in painter you don't need cage, just check the box that says (average the normals) or something like that.

wirrexx

First problem: 
Overlapping UVW



Second Problem:
Inverted UVW



Third problem: your HP mesh and LP mesh did not match up. Check it out, throw both the HP and LP into Zbrush and see how some stuff dont match up. Line them up. 
Solution:
Corrected the HP (moving stuff). 
Re-did the UVWS. and made sure there where no overlapping. Also made sure that at the UV Island cut, there's a hard edge. 
Skipped the cage and baked in SP directly. 

Did more then intendet. But yeah..free. Unless, you pay me?
I'll send you adjustet LP but the alignment fix you have to do yourself. 



So the result? 

m4dcow

Edit: Seems Udjani and Wirrexx beat me to it

That part of your High Poly doesn't line up.


Also you have a bunch of parts of your UV map that overlap each other and would leave you with a glitchy bake anyway.

There are a bunch of places where the UVs could be combined into contiguous shells and that would mean a few places with less hard edges too.

Nokdef

You guys are sick!

I feel kinda dumb for overlooking the mesh size, and I managed to fix it with your guidance! 
(Tho to be honest you guys did 90% of the work.)

But I still have a question still left unanswered. 

wirrexx said:

First problem: 
Overlapping UVW



Second Problem:
Inverted UVW

I used 3D coat to make my UV, so I just assumed it would be all set by the software itself. Should I keep using 3D Coat or I should learn how to UV by hand? 

Anyways, you guys are awesome, thanks a bunch! 

Hopefully in a couple years I'll be the one helping out newcomers. 

Nokdef

I still have some leftover questions about what  Udjani said:

2. For the love of existence, decimate the highpoly before exporting it to bake xD. It will take much less time to import/export and bake

How far should I decimate the HP? Won't I lose sculpting quality?

m4dcow

Nokdef said:

I still have some leftover questions about what  Udjani said:

2. For the love of existence, decimate the highpoly before exporting it to bake xD. It will take much less time to import/export and bake

How far should I decimate the HP? Won't I lose sculpting quality?

You can actually decimate pretty far without losing detail, think of all those flat areas where you haven't really added detail, those areas have a lot of geometry that isn't really doing anything.

Usually I can decimate by about 60% and not notice any difference, for this type of stylized model you could probably go more. Even if you go too much, you can just go back to the high poly and output a lesser decimated mesh.

Udjani

@Nokdef I don't use 3dcoat but by my experience just an auto unwrap almost never do the job for game models. You should check the uv for overlaps and distortion and see wich faces could be straightened.

For the decimation on a model like that i would go all the way to 10-20%. 

Nokdef

I think the case is closed! I'll try to learn more about UV'ing this week and thanks a lot for helping me out guys! You are all awesome!

poopipe

Udjani said:

Edit: wirrexx made a very big answare for me to hiajck it. But still some tips that will help you.

1. Use FBX with painter, obj is shit they say.
2. For the love of existence, decimate the highpoly before exporting it to bake xD. It will take much less time to import/export and bake.
3. When baking in painter you don't need cage, just check the box that says (average the normals) or something like that.

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes,  but that bit about average normals is wrong - that will soften all the edges on your low poly and is evil.  The forward and rear projection distances are what you will need to fiddle with

Udjani

@poopipe Oh yeah, you right. Whenever i think about cage i think of it for avaraging normals if you have hard edges, i always forget that you can use to control distance too.