Xnormal what is happening to my bake? why is it pink :( ?

Duckmamoll

Hello,

I was testing baking a basic high poll tire to a low pol one, I tried baking with a cage and without one, but my bakes still remains broken, it's all a weird pink color.



I've tried making the highpol smooth, but it's also totally broken
I've never seen such a weird colored normal,
What worked is turning off tangent space and then using xnormal object/tangent normal space converter, But even with that the normal doesn't look convincing

This is how it looks using this method, I think the hard seems come from the fact that my high poly isn't high poly enough, so that's alright. 
But how do I make either my tangent space normal not pink and broken? or how do I make my object space to tangent normal look more convincing?

rollin

Is the model's scale somehow very small or very big?
Btw: your highpoly is not really suited for baking Normals. 

Duckmamoll

Oh yes the scale was to 0.333, but fixing the scale made the bake even more broken? The model itself according to blender is 2 meter diameter and 0.8meter height, which should be alright, I tried both with a cage and without, and I checked the face orientation. That's how the bake looked


I've baked high poly sculpt to low poly decimated mesh which never had a problem, but I've never seen a bake like this.

also why is my high poly not suited?

rollin

There is most likely something wrong with the scale of the low or high or both.
There is no "Meter" in xnormal. Only "Units"

The high is not going to contribute a lot the the normalmap but that's not the main issue here.

Can you check your exported files in another app or in the xnormal viewer?

Edit: not sure about Blender here but maybe you have some bad transforms applied to your model which will result in too big values when exported. 
Anyhow, this should become obvious when you re-import the files. 

What format are you using for baking? obj?

Duckmamoll

So I tried viewing the mesh in a few different software and they were ok everywhere. But I was using FBX, I tried with Obj which seems to have fixed the problem thanks to your question. But I guess one of my original question remains, how to make the normal pop out the "details" more?

I also tried following a youtube tutorial on how to bake to a plane, and my normal is also pretty bad
here's the tutorial I followed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCUMFaovo4
and here's what I got


So i guess now that I've fixed the pink normal problem using obj thanks to your help . Now I need to understand how to get good bakes/high poly I've been struggling on that for quite a long time, looked at a lot of tutorials etc. This floor things seems easy, like the video I just made holes and grids, but mine looks bad

Edit I baked the tire again but added a few subdivision to the HP and a support loops, it made the normal better but still not popping up that much.

rollin

fbx has the nasty ability to hide the actual values form you as it stores a scale with the file. So obj is a good way to rule out problems with the intermediate format you use to send your data to the baker-app.

And try to give your highpoly details some less steep angles.
The Normal Map only stores the normal difference of the high-to-lowpoly mesh per pixel viewed in the direction of the local normal for each pixel. It does not store the height difference. 

Also it might depends on your material setup how good the normal map reads.

Duckmamoll

Oh I was actually aware that 90° angle can't be captured in a normal bake, but I didn't realize the grid of my model (which are just cubes) needed to be slanted. I guess that means in the video his grid despite looking flat have beveled edges. Anyway Many thanks for the lightning fast and detailed answers rollin