Baking Issue (Driving me insane!!!)

bhenderson

Hello, I am trying to get good bakes with a model to make sure I have a good workflow and I just can not get a good bale when trying everything even cages and it is just this one piece, the first piece that I am having issues with! Please any one with any knowledge on what I am doing wrong I would really appreciate it!
These are the two different low[poly's I have tried in substance with the same highpoly and a cage and without a cage and I have also adjusted the fontal and rear distance as well too and I am still getting this weird edge. Do I need to retopo am I missing something??



Also posted in substance thread not sure if this is the right place to post this (mod let me know if I need to take down)

conflig

Hi. It is not clear from this angle but from the bake result, I would say that the polygon causing issue is not planar. First, try to triangulate it from the very top or the opposite way. But the best would be probable to merge the two points and leave a triangle 

bhenderson

@conflig
Would there be a better angle to take it at, to help give you more information? I triangulated the face and made the top a triangle and still getting this weird line here and it is only on one side

conflig

Do you have the sharp edges set as.. the sharp edges? And enough space between the in UV layout?

rollin

For some weird cause my post here disappeared..
In short again:
your low and high do not match properly at the edge. You have to view both the low and the high at the same time and the issue will become obvious

bhenderson

@conflig
Yeas I do have my hard edges set to hard edges and I also have enough space in my uv layout

@rollin
I have viewed them both together and they do match on edge and I have adjusted them as needed as well and this is still an issue. Unless I am just missing something completely obvious

rollin

If it's not the same on the left and right side it sounds like it's not symmetric and the edge of the low and high are not right on the axis. 
You might be baking the curve of the highpoly's edge but this should be the same on both sides. 

Rip out two adjacent tries of the lowpoly blade edge and just bake them. You can also detach them so you end up with only two separate triangles which bake the blade from the left and right side. Then move them and see how the problematic area moves. 
There is no magic behind it. Remove all possible issues and make the test case as simple as possible until it's so simple you can just bake the result in your mind and compare to the actual result. If there is a difference between the two tries check their normals. If they are the same you are insanely lucky to just discovered an impossible bug

bhenderson

rollin said:

If it's not the same on the left and right side it sounds like it's not symmetric and the edge of the low and high are not right on the axis. 
You might be baking the curve of the highpoly's edge but this should be the same on both sides. 

Rip out two adjacent tries of the lowpoly blade edge and just bake them. You can also detach them so you end up with only two separate triangles which bake the blade from the left and right side. Then move them and see how the problematic area moves. 
There is no magic behind it. Remove all possible issues and make the test case as simple as possible until it's so simple you can just bake the result in your mind and compare to the actual result. If there is a difference between the two tries check their normals. If they are the same you are insanely lucky to just discovered an impossible bug

@rollin

 I am going to try to retopo it and get it as low as I can, thank you for the help! This is the only way I think I can get around this issue rather than using the base model I then made into my highpoly

rollin

Don't just build a new lowpoly
- make a copy of the low
- delete everything from the lowpoly but two adjacent faces (triangles) featuring the issue
- detach them ad the edge of the blade
- bake again
if there is still the same issue then upload this file and I'll check

Shrike

This line?
Thats just how your highpoly looks man



Also substance does the worst bakes imo, +really worth it to get marmoset or knald with the realtime preview, saves so much hassle

bhenderson

rollin said:

Don't just build a new lowpoly
- make a copy of the low
- delete everything from the lowpoly but two adjacent faces (triangles) featuring the issue
- detach them ad the edge of the blade
- bake again
if there is still the same issue then upload this file and I'll check

@rollin not sure if this is what you meant but I am still getting the same issue. I can send you the files if you would like to take a look I would greatly appreciate it, baking is literally the only thing I can not wrap my head around and that is a key thing I feel as if I need to know to get the results I am looking for in models. That and I am sure I could improve on my edge flow and modeling work.

@Shrike I have marmoset and I depending on end result usually use substance if I want to implement something inside of unreal and Marmoset when I do stand alone dioramas, but my baking issues are occurring in both and I am sure if I can figure it out in one I may be able to figure it out in the other! 

Shrike

I still dont see the issue? Or what am I missing? Did you look at my image?
This just looks like your highpoly. That curve in the highpoly does not follow that straight edge directly. There is nothing wrong there

Btw these bevels around the hexagon or blade inner edge are redundant, the angle is so flat that it wont ever make a difference, better spend those vertices in making that hexagon round. If anything, that hexagon that is supposed to look round, that should drive you insane : P If I can't even tell the issue after several close up shots it is surely no problem. Bakes don't have to be hyper perfect and are not a perfect technique and generally you can get away with a lot.

bhenderson

Shrike said:

I still dont see the issue? Or what am I missing? Did you look at my image?
This just looks like your highpoly. That curve in the highpoly does not follow that straight edge directly. There is nothing wrong there

Btw these bevels around the hexagon or blade inner edge are redundant, the angle is so flat that it wont ever make a difference, better spend those vertices in making that hexagon round. If anything, that hexagon that is supposed to look round, that should drive you insane : P If I can't even tell the issue after several close up shots it is surely no problem. Bakes don't have to be hyper perfect and are not a perfect technique and generally you can get away with a lot.

The issue I am having is one side of the bake looks fine, the side you captured but the issue is on the other side where I have this weird line on the bake that shows through textures.

rollin

Yes send me the files as fbx and I'll have a look.
Btw. you should learn to draw proper circles around the issue and not around everything. I took me a while too until I did understand what your're talking about..

bhenderson

rollin said:

Yes send me the files as fbx and I'll have a look.
Btw. you should learn to draw proper circles around the issue and not around everything. I took me a while too until I did understand what your're talking about..

Sorry about that it was quick and dirty with my mouse. I ended up fixing the issue now I have a new issue :<  I have a better circle drawn as well! How I fixed the other issue was I decimated the high poly and took it into Maya and retopoed it but apparently when I took the original model into Zbrush it became off centered and not symmetrical so that was my issue. As the blade went up it slightly curved so it was far away from the base geo. I didn't necessarily have too retopo but I figured I could get it lower res and just bake all of the inner detail since it doesn't affect the silhouette, but that may be my issue now is that it is too low poly because for the detail to really show through I have to raise the frontal and rear distance in Substacne all the way up to 1 so that I am assuming should be an indicator that I need to add more polys maybe???

bhenderson

I figured it out, some edges were still hardened after I softened them! Thank you for all of the help!

rollin

bhenderson said:

(...) it became off centered and not symmetrical so that was my issue. (...)

As I said. This is something you can see from the bake with a bit experience. 
Glad you found the solution yourself!

bhenderson

Yeah    took a day or two longer than I am sure it should have but after posting in multiple discords and some online research I found the solution and also got a hold of the "You're making me hard" thread which I was looking for for a long time but could never remember the name of it and that also helped answer a lot of questions. Now I plan to finish this and many other models I have been stumped on being able to bake. I am very excited!!

kanga

Sounds like you were on a budget for faces. Anyhow its basic info but I have never been able to get away with a long sharp edge by just butting up two faces. I would split the sharp edge with a double bevel making sure the sharp edge doesn't exceed 45 degrees.

Also when you start a thread its  good form to put down the solution even if no-one replies. Just for those who may be suffering a similar problem and find your thread through a search. This is also the show thread, for technical problems go to: Technical forums, and in this case Technical Talk.

Shrike

on the new screenshot its instantly obvious to be a seam
Seams are always from either:

-mismatch of UV shells and hard edges
-in engine only: from mip mapping and too low edge padding
-overlapping UVs 

The easiest workflow imo is to not care about smoothing when modelling too much, UV the thing to have the most connected faces
as possible without noticeable skewing - to save performance and UV space (each smoothing/UV vertex split doubles the vertex count there!) and then run a script to set smoothing splits to UV splits, then the whole process becomes very easy. 

rollin

As this obviously confuses people like me and @Shrike and probably also future readers I made a proper image: 

The first and initial issue was in the blue marked area where the baker missed the highpoly due to being off-center compared to the lowpoly: